Braze for Impact

Cara Fischer from Ibotta shares the world of the Technical Marketer. Rather than her focus being on strategic messaging and campaign building, she gets her hands dirty with webhooks, paginated HTML in-app messages, and Liquid personalization. Listen in to learn more about the technology behind great customer experiences. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discussed digest. We're back again with another episode of our humanity series. So thrilled to have with us today, Cara Fischer, who is on the Marketing Automation team at Ibotta.   [0:00:33] Cara Fischer: Hi everyone. How's it going?   [0:00:34] PJ Bruno: So good. Thanks for being here. And also with me to my right, good friend and coworker from the success orb, Taylor Gibb.   [0:00:42] Taylor Gibb: The success orb, coming to you live.   [0:00:44] PJ Bruno: I'm trying to make that stick. It's an orb, we think spherical, we think-   [0:00:46] Taylor Gibb: Yeah. We're in there, we're ideating. This is what the podcast booth is all about. And thank God, Cara is here with us to witness this innovation.   [0:00:55] PJ Bruno: Exactly. Cara, thanks again for carving out some time with us. So you're from Ibotta, so for folks out there who don't know, why don't you give them a little snippet of, what is Ibotta's mission? What do you guys do? What's your focus?   [0:01:07] Cara Fischer: Sure. So Ibotta is at its root, a rewarded shopping ecosystem, if you will. We provide real cash back rewards for shoppers and users who use our app. And I think that's really important to them that it's not some confusing points system where you have to do the translation, like a hundred points is a dollar or something like that. If we tell you you're going to get $2 back, that's exactly what you're going to get. We have writer... Sorry, we have users who write into us every day on our social channels and whatnot, telling us how they're Ibotta earnings help them with their day to day lives. Maybe they had an unexpected car repair that they needed to pay for, or they wanted to take their family on a vacation or wanted to buy gifts for their children for the holidays or something. And that's how Ibotta helps them.   [0:01:53] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:01:54] Cara Fischer: And then on the other side, where marketing comes in is we have so many offers in the app and how do these users, if they don't have the time to go through the app all day, marketing, with the help of Braze, can surface the content that's relevant to them. And use our learnings to personalize the content so we can get those offers in front of them.   [0:02:15] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:02:15] PJ Bruno: Love it. That's great. Talk about humanity too. You guys are bringing this to these busy users who may not be able to get the impact of your app by going in every day. I think that that's a very thoughtful way to approach your messaging. And it sounds like you're really making a difference in people's lives.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: I love it. But you mentioned before we started that you were very much on the technical side of things. So you're not going to tell us about crafting a message today. You're going to tell us about something different.   [0:02:39] Cara Fischer: Absolutely. So we use Braze webhooks in a few different ways to bring new content to our users. One of the ways we do that is we connect the webhooks with our internal database, and we're actually able to trigger new rewards for users based on their actions or inactions. So an example, maybe we have a new product piece and we're trying to push forward adoption of it. If a user tries it out for the first time, and then maybe they don't try it out for a second time for another three days, we can automatically trigger a new incentive, a bonus for them to try it out again. We can also do it if they've never tried it and maybe they're 20 days after registering and we want them to try a piece of the app that they haven't tried, we can make an incentive for them.   [0:03:31] Taylor Gibb: Wow. That's so advanced. I got to say, I'm geeking out as a member of the success team. Using webhooks for something like that.   [0:03:37] PJ Bruno: Webhook is serious.   [0:03:39] Taylor Gibb: Inspired.   [0:03:39] PJ Bruno: That's sophisticated business.   [0:03:40] Taylor Gibb: Inspired. I think that's great. And so it sounds like you've got, users have purchased X item or maybe have not done X engagement in a while. Do you build journeys and personas based on these as well? Or is this just kind of action-based learnings?   [0:03:57] Cara Fischer: It's definitely very action-based. I believe in the future, we are looking into more journeys. We do use a few nurture tracks based on different purchases you make, whether maybe you purchase from an apparel retailer or a travel retailer. If you bought a flight through us, we have an idea that you're going to be traveling soon so we can send you messages based on that.   [0:04:19] Taylor Gibb: That's so great. And I also have to say, geeking out again, that your Canvas flow for onboarding is one that I like to kind of tout to all of my customers and tell them to go download the app and see how warmly they're welcomed in.   [0:04:33] Cara Fischer: Oh, that's fantastic.   [0:04:33] Taylor Gibb: So you guys are doing great.   [0:04:35] PJ Bruno: She brags about it. She knows intimately your Canvas flows.   [0:04:38] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. I dream about them at night. It's really, I'm just defending your Colorado stance as well. As a fellow Coloradan, we got to stick together.   [0:04:46] PJ Bruno: That's good. Buds for life. Well, since you mentioned webhooks, I mean, we're already in the vein. Let's talk multichannel approach.   [0:04:53] Taylor Gibb: Nice.   [0:04:54] PJ Bruno: You guys go across many different channels. So how do you leverage the channels that you do have to reach users and regenerate interest when they've gone silent?   [0:05:04] Cara Fischer: Well, I'm glad you brought up Canvas. We made that transition to using disparate Campaigns, to using Canvas for our early life cycle about a year ago. And I'm so glad we made that change because it's so much easier to iterate when you're using a Canvas. We definitely use the full suite of emails, pushes, in app messages. We have been recently using custom HTML paginated or swipeable in app messages.   [0:05:30] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:05:31] Cara Fischer: And I think those are performing really well, especially when we have new pieces of the app that we want to educate our savers about.   [0:05:37] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:05:38] Cara Fischer: Yes. And we have a joke on our team, can we do it with webhooks? It's just a thing we talk about all the time. As the more technical side of the team, as opposed to the marketing strategy.   [0:05:53] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:05:54] Cara Fischer: Different members of our team will come up to me and be like, "Can we perk it in this way?" And I'm like, "I think I can do it with a webhook."   [0:05:59] PJ Bruno: Right, right. It's cool, because a webhook, it's almost like a gorilla approach. It's kind of strapping things together, but in the same token, it is automation and it can scale if you do it the right way.   [0:06:12] Taylor Gibb: And so I'm curious to hear about the ways in which you interact with your marketing team. As being on this tech team, it sounds like you guys have a good thing going, right? They're saying, "We're going to provide some messaging. We're going to be building all these different automations, but we want you to help us iterate on the best way to optimize this." Is that the way that things kind of go?   [0:06:30] Cara Fischer: Yes, I would say so. I really value the way Ibotta's marketing team is set up. We're very specialized, where I work very technically and can provide that kind of consulting with other members of our team.   [0:06:45] PJ Bruno: Love it.   [0:06:45] Cara Fischer: And we do try to cross train a little bit so that they understand some of our capabilities, but I think the specialized roles really help everyone to get really good at what they're doing rather than a jack of all trades type of marketing team.   [0:06:58] Taylor Gibb: Totally. You guys are like the Avengers of marketing over there.   [0:07:02] PJ Bruno: So what do you guys see as far as expansion into channels? Is there anything that's on the docket for next to explore? I mean, the fact that you're talking about HTML, I mean to me, when someone says they're doing HTML anything, I'm like, "That's a sophisticated team. They're probably doing it the right way." So I'd love to hear what you guys are looking to the future and what's exciting.   [0:07:21] Cara Fischer: We actually are building out our HTML dev team on our... So we don't even have to worry about that so much.   [0:07:29] Taylor Gibb: That's ideal.   [0:07:29] PJ Bruno: Let's go.   [0:07:29] Cara Fischer: Yeah, it's really tremendous. We're very fortunate for that. Next, we're definitely excited to use content cards. We're learning more about SMS, as you all are developing that tool.   [0:07:41] Taylor Gibb: SMS, that's the hot topic today.   [0:07:43] Cara Fischer: Yeah. And we partner with Radar, a third party geolocation provider.   [0:07:51] PJ Bruno: Love it.   [0:07:52] Cara Fischer: And they just released a new piece to their product where we can look at segments of users who are frequenting different locations and target our content with that.   [0:08:04] PJ Bruno: Nick Patrick at Radar, they're doing a great thing over there.   [0:08:07] Cara Fischer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:08:07] Taylor Gibb: That's one of our Braze alloys too. And the ability to segment based on people's habitual going to different locations, do you have any plans for that? Are you going to target someone like me, who is ironically addicted to Target the store, differently than you would someone at Walmart or something like that?   [0:08:23] Cara Fischer: Most likely. I probably can't speak too much to that just because of my role of being less the marketing strategy.   [0:08:31] PJ Bruno: She's winking right now. You can't see that but she knows. She's just not going to tell us.   [0:08:35] Cara Fischer: But I am excited when the rest of our team says, "Cara, we want to do this with the new Radar feature. Can we do it?" And then I'll get to test it out, write the Liquid. Excited for that.   [0:08:47] PJ Bruno: I love it.   [0:08:48] Taylor Gibb: You're writing the Liquid too?   [0:08:49] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're writing the Liquid?   [0:08:49] Cara Fischer: Oh, yes.   [0:08:49] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:08:50] Cara Fischer: I guess we haven't talked about that yet.   [0:08:53] PJ Bruno: We haven't talked about that.   [0:08:53] Cara Fischer: Yes, all about the Liquid.   [0:08:53] PJ Bruno: We both, we love Liquid.   [0:08:55] Taylor Gibb: We live in Liquid.   [0:08:56] PJ Bruno: I did a speaking session at LTR last year on Liquid. She wrote the book on Liquid. You did. I mean, she wrote the updated deck to train ourselves internally on Liquid.   [0:09:07] Taylor Gibb: That's more like it. Yeah.   [0:09:08] PJ Bruno: For those of you who don't know, Liquid is a templating language created by Shopify back in 2006. But it's so cool.   [0:09:16] Cara Fischer: Is it that old?   [0:09:17] PJ Bruno: It is that old, yeah.   [0:09:17] Cara Fischer: I had no idea.   [0:09:17] Taylor Gibb: It is, yeah.   [0:09:18] Cara Fischer: Okay, wow.   [0:09:18] PJ Bruno: Fact check me if you want.   [0:09:20] Taylor Gibb: Constantly iterating though.   [0:09:21] PJ Bruno: That was literally copy paste from my deck. So it just stuck.   [0:09:23] Taylor Gibb: The more you know.   [0:09:25] PJ Bruno: That's just so cool though because it makes sense to me now, because you're a tech person, you deal with Liquid. But in my head, I guess I just want to facilitate marketers and crafters of messages to be able to use it too. But that's rad. You're a consultancy within your company, basically.   [0:09:43] Cara Fischer: I love that.   [0:09:44] PJ Bruno: You love that, don't you?   [0:09:46] Taylor Gibb: Somebody get this girl a raise.   [0:09:48] PJ Bruno: That's brilliant. Cool. Well Cara, thank you so much for joining us for this brief moment in time to share with us what you're doing at Ibotta.   [0:09:55] Cara Fischer: Thanks y'all.   [0:09:56] PJ Bruno: And Taylor, always, thank you for the company. Thank you for the color commentary. Thank you, my compatriot.   [0:10:01] Taylor Gibb: Oh my gosh. Anytime.   [0:10:02] PJ Bruno: And thank you all for joining us. Take care. [0:10:05]

Andrew Cordes, UK CEO at Alite International, joins us to shed light on digital transformation, giving insight into the consultant's role in not just creating additional capability and capacity, but also turning companies into responsive organizations built for change. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

Mai Tran, CRM Manager at Blinkist, gives us a glimpse into the Blinkist company mission behind snackable insights. We also delve into the shift we're seeing in KPI focuses, and the power of personalization and recommendation engines. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:16] Taylor Gibb: Are we recording?   [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: We're live. We are fire right now. So whenever you want to give us the kick off.   [0:00:23] Taylor Gibb: Oh, fire flames. All right, here I go. I'm going to probably say it wrong. Welcome back to Braze for Impact. Remember guys, this is the MarTech Industry Discuss Digest, and we're right in the middle of our humanities series. This means we're talking to some really interesting people who use Braze. We actually are at LTR right now recording. My name is Taylor Gibb. I'm a CSM on the Braze team. Across from me here is Mai Tran who was at Blinkist as a CRM manager. Mai, it's so good to meet you.   [0:00:53] Mai Tran: Nice to meet you too.   [0:00:55] Taylor Gibb: And to my left, as ever, we've got PJ Bruno who runs Client Education of Braze. PJ, how's it going?   [0:01:02] PJ Bruno: Very, very well. Glad to be back here with you, Taylor.   [0:01:05] Taylor Gibb: Well, excellent. You didn't see everybody, but I just got a salute from PJ. That's a new one.   [0:01:09] PJ Bruno: I was thinking about it as I did. I was like, "No one's going to hear the salute."   [0:01:12] Taylor Gibb: Oh no. When you're with me, everybody will hear the salute. I'm going to make sure to keep you honest on that one.   [0:01:17] PJ Bruno: What a pal. Friend and coworker forever.   [0:01:20] Mai Tran: Sounds great.   [0:01:20] Taylor Gibb: Oh, that's right. Mai, thank you again for joining us here today. As we've been going through this humanity series, we've been talking a lot, not only about the ways that you use Braze, your marketing tech stack, but about you, how you got to where you are right now and about the company you work for.   [0:01:36] Mai Tran: That's nice.   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: I know. Well, that's what we're hoping for.   [0:01:38] Mai Tran: Cool. I'll start with a little bit about myself because I think it's connected very well to how I ended up at Blinkist. I started out my career quite traditionally. I study creative writing and I wanted to work for publishing because I realized very quickly that I wouldn't be able to write so much or make a living writing, which is very, very tough.   [0:02:02] Taylor Gibb: That's a tough [crosstalk] The starving artist.   [0:02:04] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:02:04] PJ Bruno: Diverse the skills. I get it.   [0:02:06] Mai Tran: Exactly. Yeah. You really have to have a very specific personality to be able to pursuit art in any kind. So yeah, I decided to ... Very early on, I wanted to devote my life to supporting artists and being able to work with authors that I believe and I loved. I started on my career in publishing and it was not an easy industry to get into. It's a very old industry. A lot of things doesn't move as fast as the startup world that we have nowadays. Yeah, kind of at the one year after I graduated, I discovered Blinkist. It was a very nice discovery because I was a little bit fed up with the corporate world and how things are being done there. I started to look more into the startup world and see how people work differently, how products are being put together in a different way. Blinkist is like a happy in between, because everything that they do in terms of culture there at Blinkist, I truly love. Then on top of that, they have a product that I do believe in and it's very much connected to my heart, which is books. [crosstalk]   [0:03:31] PJ Bruno: I love that so much. So the publisher you came from, was that in Berlin as well?   [0:03:36] Mai Tran: No. I actually used to work for Random House here.   [0:03:39] Taylor Gibb: Really?   [0:03:40] Mai Tran: Yeah, in New York.   [0:03:41] PJ Bruno: Cool. Welcome back.   [0:03:42] Taylor Gibb: You're an ex New Yorker. Well, I mean once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker.   [0:03:45] PJ Bruno: For life.   [0:03:45] Mai Tran: I guess so.   [0:03:46] Taylor Gibb: But we're glad to have you back. It sounds like you move from publishing because it was, as we know, a slightly more traditional industry. You said it's more slow moving, to something that's a little techier, it is an app, a software. Blinkist does that as well, right? If I understand correctly, Blinkist is taking something that's intimidating to some people, these big, oftentimes nonfiction, tomes, quote unquote, and making them more digestible.   [0:04:12] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:04:12] Taylor Gibb: Can you talk a little bit more about that?   [0:04:14] Mai Tran: Yeah. So Blinkist, we like to believe that we're on a mission to be the leading destinations for the modern lifelong learner. It's a very, very nice mission statement that I always hold dear to my heart because I truly believe that our product is going to that direction. Everything we do is to help people learn more, not necessarily finding shortcuts when it comes to learning or finding shortcuts when it comes to reading, but ultimately you have to face the reality that nowadays people don't have that 10 hours in their day so that they can just sit down with a good book and read for 10 hours straight. It's not going to happen. The reading and the learning is going to happen on the subway, on your way to work. It's going to happen in the 10 minutes that you are trying to dress your kid to go to the nursery school. Yeah, and Blinkist does help those people with a very, very busy lifestyle to be able to squeeze in a little bit of learning and a little bit of reading into their day.   [0:05:21] Taylor Gibb: I love that. It's not offering shortcuts, but it's making this learning and this wisdom accessible, no matter how much time you have.   [0:05:28] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:05:29] Taylor Gibb: PJ, you earlier said that you were intrigued by Blinkist.   [0:05:32] PJ Bruno: I am. I mean, I unfortunately likened it to CliffsNotes, which is incorrect in terms of the mission, because CliffsNotes is like shortcut, here, now.   [0:05:42] Taylor Gibb: Right. I don't want to read Romeo and Juliet. Who dies?   [0:05:45] PJ Bruno: Exactly. They both died. Got it. Got the whole story understand it.   [0:05:48] Taylor Gibb: And we're done.   [0:05:49] PJ Bruno: But Blinkist, it's actually more distilling those valuable insights when it comes to those books. So for someone like me, I do love to read Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek. But when it's not a narrative, sometimes I end up just reading the same paragraph over and over again. For some reason I will find mental blocks where I get stuck. Because in a narrative, a story can exist somewhere. Even though it's in my mind, I can feel the physical space. When you're talking conceptually about things, and Simon Sinek is just explaining page after page his thoughts, letting them unfurl. That's something that sometimes I get lost or I just get distracted. So something like this from Blinkist, it can keep me on that path. It can keep me focused. Sometimes you feel like you're waiting around for the big payoff with some of these writers, because Simon Sinek, just like all these guys, they have a general idea of their arc, of what the book should be, A, B and C. Then it's like, "It's time to stuff 80 pages in each of these." So sometimes some chapters are a little long winded. I'm just, I don't always have the patience for it. So something like Blinkist for the ... What did you call it? The forever learner or ...   [0:07:01] Taylor Gibb: Lifelong learner.   [0:07:02] Mai Tran: The lifelong learner. Yeah.   [0:07:03] PJ Bruno: So good.   [0:07:04] Taylor Gibb: Get that alliteration in there.   [0:07:06] Mai Tran: That's great.   [0:07:07] Taylor Gibb: Remind me, when did you start at Blinkist? How many years ago?   [0:07:10] Mai Tran: It's been a little bit over two years now.   [0:07:12] Taylor Gibb: That's great. Have things changed. So going from the world of publishing, where everything took a million years to move forward, I bet here things move a mile a minute. How have things changed in terms of your tech stack, in terms of even your marketing strategies since you started?   [0:07:26] Mai Tran: Well, quite a lot. When I first started, it was literally just me and another person in our team. Now we've grown to be a small team of four, but in terms of the capability of what we do within CRM has changed so much. Originally, when we first started, we focused, because we only have limited human resource. We focus a lot of things on conversion because that's what everybody cares about. That's what marketing cares about. We're under marketing at that point. I spend most of my time talking to very new users who are soon to be customers and trying to help them understand the value of Blinkist and try to find a price point that makes sense for them and convert them. It's very interesting. It's my first time working with more conversion-based communications. It's very different from the kind of work that I do at publishing. But it was very fun. I think what I appreciate the most is that it's very easy to understand that funnel, because the KPIs are very clear. You either purchase or you don't purchase.   [0:08:43] Taylor Gibb: That's true.   [0:08:44] Mai Tran: It's very simplistic in some ways. Now, about a year ago, I started to move to the engagement space because as a company, we realize that we grow in such a high pace that we started to see a drop in retention naturally, because you started to acquire more customer or more users that have less intent, doesn't understand Blinkist as well. Because of that, people are less likely to stay on for the product.   [0:09:19] PJ Bruno: Just from the general volume you guys are doing, it's balancing.   [0:09:22] Mai Tran: Exactly. Yeah.   [0:09:23] Taylor Gibb: Makes sense.   [0:09:23] Mai Tran: We decided to put a lot of focus on customer engagement and customer retention. I decided to move into that space. I thought that it's a very nice comeback to the publishing world because then, again, it's about getting people to engage with content and getting people to know what is new, what is relevant to them, et cetera, et cetera. It was very exciting for me. Then it's also a big challenge because with engagement, it's not as clear cut as conversion. There's a lot of KPIs out there. You don't know which one makes sense. You always optimize for the immediate one. So open rate, click rate, which copy makes more people engage with that content. But it's not necessarily that, because what you want to impact in the end is renewal. So how many people stay on over time? That's such a long time span that you start to test with different KPIs. Okay, what exactly is it? Is it reading five books that gets people more likely to stay? Is it spending more time in the app? Is it spending more time listening over reading? All of that is very exciting and challenging for me.   [0:10:39] PJ Bruno: Just that shift from the understanding of conversion event to being a goal to renewal, that in of itself, that's an infinite minded [crosstalk 00:00:10:50]. That's looking to the future as opposed to like, "Oh, it's ..." sometimes, I don't want to put salespeople in a bucket, but you have a quarterly goal so you obsess over that quarterly goal. Sometimes you do things that actually do not help you long term just to hit it.   [0:11:03] Mai Tran: In the long run, exactly. Yeah.   [0:11:04] PJ Bruno: So I love that you guys are looking so far down the line. It's great.   [0:11:07] Taylor Gibb: One thing I wanted to talk to you about as well, so as you are moving forward with these new KPIs and a more fleshed out, perhaps forward-looking attack towards getting users to ... Getting that retention further, how are you looking at the data? Have you guys engaged with anyone in a tech stack or are you just kind of looking at the numbers as they come through? On top of that, you spoke a little bit about actions like listening or reading books, what kind of actions are you looking for people to complete in your app that you think lead to that retention?   [0:11:42] Mai Tran: Yeah. I thought that you would ask that question.   [0:11:45] Taylor Gibb: I know.   [0:11:47] PJ Bruno: Were you scared that she would ask that question?   [0:11:49] Mai Tran: Yeah.   [0:11:49] Taylor Gibb: Oh gosh.   [0:11:49] Mai Tran: I was kind of.   [0:11:50] Taylor Gibb: Not meant to be a scary one.   [0:11:52] Mai Tran: No. It's because it's still a learning experience for us. It's very difficult to find that tipping point or to find that one key action that actually will ensure that 99% of people who does that action is going to stay on. But it's very important to find that important action. We're in the process of discovering that. We're very much at the beginning, which is to define the baseline. What we're doing now is instead of trying to artificially scale up a certain action, like read five books, not knowing if that is going to impact at all the renewal rate in the end, what we're doing now is actually spread our efforts across all different KPIs that we consider to be baseline KPIs. We're looking at everything in terms of time spent in the app, time spent actually reading or listening. We call them content consumption. Then we look at the finished rate. If you start reading something, do you finish it? If you finish it, are you more likely to stay on? Are you more likely to engage further? We also look at discovery rates. If you discover more content, are you more likely to find value in the app? Yeah, all kinds of things. One very interesting findings that we recently discover was that was variety, which is very interesting because-   [0:13:25] Taylor Gibb: That is.   [0:13:26] Mai Tran: Yeah. Personalization is all about offering up what you like, what is relevant to you based on what you've read in the past. But we've come to realize that people who read more outside of their comfort zone are more likely to renew.   [0:13:43] PJ Bruno: That's rad. That's very cool.   [0:13:44] Mai Tran: Yeah. So it's really a fine balance between, "Okay, we know what you like, and we offer you more of that." And then introducing to you more new things that we think you might like. So things like taste breakers, essentially, is also very, very interesting to us. But going back to your question, yeah, right now it's finding that baseline and seeing where that blip happened.   [0:14:11] PJ Bruno: I love that mission, the high-value-action mission, which all of us should be concerned with and doing. You said you guys are just starting your mission. The truth is it takes a long time to figure that out. Even when you figure it out, it changes.   [0:14:26] Mai Tran: You're not sure.   [0:14:26] Taylor Gibb: That's right. It's always evolving.   [0:14:27] PJ Bruno: You're not sure, it changes. Like you mentioned, you just have so much data coming in. There's so many ways to look at it and splice it. All I can say is hats off to you on doing it and best of luck in doing that, because it's huge. When you're able to discern those two to three high value actions, that three X, five X, that LTV of a customer, I mean, it's massive. It's game changing.   [0:14:50] Taylor Gibb: And surprising, it sounds like, the fact that variety has a part in all of this. It sounds like you did some testing and it's kind of fun when you're surprised by the results. That's really exciting. Final thing that I want to talk to you about a little bit here is what's on the horizon, both for you and your team and for Blinkist right now? Obviously don't talk about anything you're not allowed to. Unless we're all going to keep secrets here. But let me know what's coming up on the horizon.   [0:15:21] Mai Tran: Something that's coming up for CRM at Blinkist is, I guess, ramping up our recommendation system and really leverage connected content and personalization at Braze to bring that personalized content directly to the user, instead of waiting for them to come to the app. This is something that we literally started testing last week. I'm still waiting for results.   [0:15:48] Taylor Gibb: Oh, brand new.   [0:15:48] PJ Bruno: Exciting.   [0:15:48] Mai Tran: Yeah. I really hope it worked well Because I've heard many funny stories from our customers about personalization, because you never know how they're going to interpret that recommendation.   [0:16:03] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:16:04] Mai Tran: We had one user writing in saying that, "Why are you such a racist company? No, not racist, sexist company. "Why do you offer me only female books?" We were really surprised because we don't know our user's gender. We never ask, we don't track that. Our data-   [0:16:27] PJ Bruno: So you had to respond, "This was just based on your history."   [0:16:29] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:16:29] Taylor Gibb: This is what you've been reading.   [0:16:31] Mai Tran: It was based on the last book that they read.   [0:16:34] PJ Bruno: Do what know what was their response after that? Do you know?   [0:16:37] Mai Tran: No. I didn't know.   [0:16:38] PJ Bruno: They were like no response.   [0:16:40] Taylor Gibb: Oh wait, no. Nevermind.   [0:16:41] Mai Tran: But yeah, so recommendation, it's really cool for us and especially being able to bring that into CRM and to be able to offer up content when it's relevant to them is what I'm looking forward to.   [0:16:55] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I mean, all I would say for connected content, I mean, it just works in terms of personalization if you set it up and if your systems are set up to handle the speed with which it's hitting it. That's when problems can occur. So make sure you're set up for speed. God, that's awesome. I'm excited for you guys.   [0:17:13] Taylor Gibb: You're you're taking a crack at CSM-ship here, PJ.   [0:17:16] PJ Bruno: I don't know.   [0:17:17] Taylor Gibb: I love to hear it.   [0:17:18] PJ Bruno: I hang out with you too much, I guess.   [0:17:19] Taylor Gibb: I think that might be the problem here. Well, best of luck to you. I'll be so excited. I'm going to start trying, I think. I will not complain if I get too many female book recommendations because now I know.   [0:17:31] PJ Bruno: It's just an algorithm.   [0:17:32] Taylor Gibb: It's just the algorithm.   [0:17:32] Mai Tran: It's just the algorithm.   [0:17:33] Taylor Gibb: It's just ... And taste breakers, who knows. Next time we talk, I'm going to be full of wisdom. I feel it.   [0:17:38] PJ Bruno: I'm going to hold you to that.   [0:17:39] Taylor Gibb: I know. We'll see. Full of something. Thank you so much for joining us.   [0:17:44] Mai Tran: Thank you for having me.   [0:17:45] Taylor Gibb: It was so great to meet you. PJ, as always, thanks for joining me here on the mic.   [0:17:49] PJ Bruno: Thanks again.   [0:17:49] Taylor Gibb: On the ones and twos. And all of you guys out there, thanks as always for dialing in. I'll talk to you later. [0:17:54]

Zoltan Szalas, Senior Product Manager of Growth at IBM, saddles up with us to talk machine learning, his early days at startup Croissant, and how to get buy-in across teams to hit goals. We also get a little spacey and talk quantum computing! *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Taylor, take us there, we're hot.   [0:00:19] Taylor Gibb: Here I go.   [0:00:20] Zoltan Szalas: Let's rock and roll.   [0:00:20] Taylor Gibb: All right. Welcome back to Braze for Impact. This is your MarTech industry discuss digest. And we're here in the middle of our humanity series, and I'm lucky enough to be seated across from Zoltan Szalas who is the senior product manager for growth at none other than IBM. This is a big deal guys. And Zoltan, we're so happy to have you in the studio with us.   [0:00:42] Zoltan Szalas: Well thanks for having me   [0:00:44] Taylor Gibb: Anytime. And to my left, as always, is PJ Bruno who runs client education here at Braze. PJ, how's it going?   [0:00:52] PJ Bruno: Feeling so good, feeling right. I'm excited for this one.   [0:00:54] Taylor Gibb: Oh, this is going to be a really good one. Zoltan, I know that you've done a little prep with PJ before the session.   [0:01:00] Zoltan Szalas: I did, I did.   [0:01:00] Taylor Gibb: It's exciting to think that you were thinking about this before coming in. I just want to hear from you a little bit about, I mean IBM. IBM is think, but what does that mean?   [0:01:10] Zoltan Szalas: Think.   [0:01:11] Taylor Gibb: Exactly. So obviously brand recognition isn't a problem these days, but are there ways that you're working to do things like leverage machine learning or push the limit in increasing your user base overall?   [0:01:24] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right, IBM, there's no brand recognition problem there.   [0:01:30] Taylor Gibb: Right?   [0:01:30] Zoltan Szalas: Like I got a job at IBM and my mom's like, "Oh my God, that's amazing." She has no idea what we do, or what I do. But she was so excited. But competition is fierce. I mean IBM alone has over something like several hundred products. And there are startups entering from all over the place, like entering our space and kind of biting away at the business. So growth for IBM, there's a granular level growth where we utilize things like machine learning. So one of the things that we're implementing right now is a retention AI tool. So what that does is when an account is going into defection, so when it comes up for churn.   [0:02:09] Taylor Gibb: Lapsing user.   [0:02:10] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. It sends a notification to the according CSM or whoever owns that account. Now on the flip side it also does it for expansion. So for example, let's say somebody is expanding on their usage of natural learning processing or Watson Assistant, it's going to notify the CSM so they can reach out to them, have the conversation of upsell, cross selling. And we're going to be implementing that into, I know you guys didn't want to talk about Braze, but we're going to be implementing that into Braze for customers who don't have a CSM assigned, right?   [0:02:41] Taylor Gibb: Really?   [0:02:41] PJ Bruno: What's Braze?   [0:02:42] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, never heard of her. Who is she?   [0:02:46] PJ Bruno: Keep going.   [0:02:48] Zoltan Szalas: So that's at the product level. And it's really kind of eating your own dog food, and really implementing things to grow the user base but on a macro level. Things like the Red Hat acquisition, right? Like understanding that and the significance that it's going to have. You have to ask the question of why did we spend $36 billion on an acquisition? That's a 15 to 20 year return. That's where the market is-   [0:03:11] PJ Bruno: That is a long game.   [0:03:12] Zoltan Szalas: It is a long game.   [0:03:13] Taylor Gibb: And smart.   [0:03:14] Zoltan Szalas: But that that strategic partnership is going to allow us to exponentially grow our user base.   [0:03:20] PJ Bruno: That's future-proofing right there man.   [0:03:21] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: Very cool. And I just love, like I know we talked about it a little bit, you and I got time to strategize and chat. And I just loved the idea that you're able to run a relatively lean operation with your guys in this big company. And it seems like you guys have already had a bunch of traction. And when I talked to you, you kind of were in the pivot situation where you were able to like, "All right, the stuff we're doing is working. I've gotten this buy-in, and now we're onto bigger and better things."   [0:03:51] Zoltan Szalas: It's interesting because initially, as you said, I was in this position, pivotal moment. And it was really interesting because growth and innovation, sure, you have your growth stack, you have amplitude segment and things like that. But for a company like IBM that's over 100 years old, that's three digits.   [0:04:13] PJ Bruno: Jesus.   [0:04:14] Zoltan Szalas: There aren't a lot of companies in the world that have three digits.   [0:04:17] Taylor Gibb: And definitely not a lot of tech companies in the world. Right?   [0:04:19] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. Exactly. So you have to ask yourself where does innovation come from? And it really happens within the culture, within the people. And kind of going back to that is when my managers started the growth program, one of the hardest things we had was to get that buy-in. So when people started to see that, "Oh wow, this actually works. This is producing results", then that buy-in comes a lot quicker. And now we're in this luxury place where people are like, "Oh yeah, yeah, do whatever it is that you do. I'm not really sure. But just go do it. And get some amazing results."   [0:04:55] Taylor Gibb: That's great. And you guys have made room then for innovation, right? Other people within your company can feel more empowered to step forward with their ideas to start making these changes. And so it sounds like you're doing the right work.   [0:05:08] PJ Bruno: The way you mentioned it, your first position with IBM, right, you had to get buy-in. You were a team, a guy, that had a solution, that had to go around, kind of shop it around. When you started there, how much was being prescribed to you by your boss and how much was like, "Figure it out"? It's like how much was a mandate and how much was that creative layer for you to like, "All right, let's get weird with it."   [0:05:34] Zoltan Szalas: I was lucky to have great managers who gave me a lot of autonomy. I came on at the early stage of the growth program. So a lot of it was like, "Hey, figure it out, and find people that are willing to work with us to prove out this model."   [0:05:51] PJ Bruno: So long leash then. I mean it just was like, "You're here to make things better."   [0:05:56] Zoltan Szalas: Right.   [0:05:57] PJ Bruno: Go.   [0:05:57] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. And I just transitioned from a startup of five people. And I'm like, "All right, you want me to execute?" I execute. I did a couple of things and I got yelled at for breaking a couple of pages.   [0:06:11] Taylor Gibb: You got to break a few pages to make an omelet. Isn't that what they say?   [0:06:14] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. But what I did break the page, it resulted in, I don't know, like the annualized, I broke the page on something and somebody reached out to whoever owns a page. Because IBM's a matrix organization. So there is a person for everything, right? So it's hard to just kind of go in. And my mindset coming from a startup is like, "Okay, this should have been done yesterday. Let's get this done." But IBM doesn't work like that. And you have to figure out. I think the best analogy I got is it's like a duck. The duck floats on top of the water, right? It's very elegant and kind of flows through. But underneath its little legs are churning away.   [0:06:54] PJ Bruno: Mile a minute.   [0:06:54] Zoltan Szalas: Churning away. Exactly. So working on multiple projects and growth initiatives, that's how I figured out. Like how can you execute ... You just have to be able to focus on several things at a time and wait for things to come in.   [0:07:06] PJ Bruno: And you got to break pages. I mean it's a special projects team. If you're not breaking pages you're not doing it right.   [0:07:11] Taylor Gibb: You're doing something wrong.   [0:07:11] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly.   [0:07:12] Taylor Gibb: That's right. And you were working on all the different projects. One of them that PJ actually brought to my attention before we got in the room here was Croissant, which sounds like it started as a hackathon project, and then you were able to make it into this brand and this huge initiative-   [0:07:27] PJ Bruno: A global brand.   [0:07:27] Taylor Gibb: Global brand and initiative. So clearly you weren't just breaking pages, you were really making things happen. Do you mind talking a bit about that?   [0:07:33] Zoltan Szalas: No, I'd love to. And do you guys mind if, my co founder Adam asked me to give him a shout out.   [0:07:39] Taylor Gibb: Oh please.   [0:07:40] Zoltan Szalas: And he wanted me to call him by his code name Savage. Is that okay?   [0:07:45] Taylor Gibb: I think, do you know what?   [0:07:45] PJ Bruno: Do you have a message for him or is it just?   [0:07:47] Zoltan Szalas: Nope, he just wanted me to give him a shout out. Savage.   [0:07:49] Taylor Gibb: That's the first-   [0:07:50] PJ Bruno: Keep breaking pages Savage   [0:07:52] Taylor Gibb: ... The first shout out in Braze for Impact history and I can't think of a way that it could have gone better. Well done. Savage, this one's for you.   [0:07:59] PJ Bruno: We're making history here. Ba-da-bing.   [0:08:01] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, it came out of a hackathon project. We were working on this business that obviously didn't go anywhere, and one weekend we went to a hackathon and we kind of coded up this product that would essentially allow you to book a seat at a coffee shop. Because that company arose from like a very natural need. We were running around the city, working out of coffee shops. And it was a pain in the ass. Can I say ass?   [0:08:26] Taylor Gibb: You saw that meme yourselves. Yeah.   [0:08:27] PJ Bruno: Yeah, you can, we can't.   [0:08:29] Zoltan Szalas: So it came out of a hackathon project. And in that one weekend we saw so much positive feedback from the people through media, through PR, that we just said, "We have something here." So we did a little bit of market testing. We shopped it around to coffee shops. Coffee shops didn't want it. They're like, "Oh no, no, no. This is a coffee shop. This is a democratic place. Nobody's going to get a seat here." But somebody had given us, like months prior, a map of all the coworking spaces in the city. And there were something like 200. And this was back at the time where the WeWorks was unknown. You would be like, "WeWork." People would be like, "What's WeWork? What's coworking? What's shared office space?"   [0:09:07] Taylor Gibb: Interesting.   [0:09:08] Zoltan Szalas: So we walked in randomly on one day, we're just like, we walked into a coworking space and he said, "Hey, we're building this platform. Would you guys be interested in coming on as a space partner?" And they said yes. And then we said okay. So the supply side is resonating positively. And then we sent out a bunch of emails.   [0:09:28] Taylor Gibb: I think you emailed us.   [0:09:30] PJ Bruno: I know where this is going, sorry.   [0:09:32] Zoltan Szalas: We sent out a bunch of emails advertising our $300 product for MVP that just barely existed, and people bought. So we said, "Okay, we have something here. So what's next?" So we built out the product and we took it from inception to ... we've had over 10,000 customers on the platform. But it's really interesting because the story, as funny as it is, when you're building a business, you have very limited data to work with.   [0:10:03] Taylor Gibb: Sure. You're starting from the ground up.   [0:10:04] Zoltan Szalas: So every feedback you're using as a compass, right? Like, "Okay, this direction makes sense. This direction makes sense." At the very early stages, right, before you're collecting like hundreds of thousands or millions of data points, you're almost using qualitative data to get feedback on which direction to take your company.   [0:10:26] PJ Bruno: Yeah, that's tough though sometimes. Sometimes you, I don't know about you, but I've taken lots of feedback and sometimes I'll give it the wrong weight. I'll take one person's feedback and make some sort of pivot that's going to affect the next quarter or something. So when you have all the data to work with, you have the quantity to work with.   [0:10:45] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, and you know what it is? You know that saying ignorance is bliss?   [0:10:50] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:10:51] Zoltan Szalas: When I look back on the Croissant journey, it was the most reckless insensible thing I did. Just straight up quit my job and just follow this instinct. Right? But that ignorance is bliss to a degree because you're just following whatever is working. Right? So it's kind of almost a blessing to not have all the data that early on, because you're just, don't take this advice as sound, this is not guarantee, there is no money back guarantee. But if you follow ... Life gives you feedback, people give you feedback, the market gives you feedback. Right? So I think it's important to be proactive and just trying to get that feedback early on. But it was a lot of fun and we scaled it into, we're in over like 120 cities now. And it was a lot of fun.   [0:11:36] Taylor Gibb: Wow. That is incredible. And you got there from following your gut, right?   [0:11:39] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:11:40] Taylor Gibb: And trusting those instincts. Are you still able to bring a little bit of that to your day to day when you're at IBM?   [0:11:46] Zoltan Szalas: Yes, but I have to get buy-in.   [0:11:48] PJ Bruno: Got to get that buy-in.   [0:11:50] Taylor Gibb: Some things have to change a little bit. But it sounds like you've been able to build that up.   [0:11:53] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, and I think IBM is a great learning ground for me. Because at IBM, more of your soft skills have to come into play. They have to come to the foreground. Because you're dealing with cross functional teams that each have their own objectives and a lot of times they're not aligned. So the question becomes is, "Okay, I want to change something on this page. How do I get the development team, the design team, the product team to come together and align to make that change happen?" And that's the biggest difference. When you're running a startup you have an insight and you're like, "Okay, well let's execute on it." You execute on it, you ship it out the door, done. Wait for the feedback loop, iterate or implement or do something else. Right? But with IBM it's been a real amazing time to learn how to use those soft skills. And I'm still able to use, you still go by your gut, like there's patterns that you recognize so you already know like, "Okay, we should do this, we should do this nurture or that nurture." So definitely.   [0:12:57] PJ Bruno: That's so interesting to me, and it just identified a huge gap, and that's obviously understanding technology and your tech stack, that's something that we're all obsessed with. You mentioned soft skills. This isn't the same as leadership or conflict resolution. This is governance across teams. And like how you orchestrate, facilitate those conversations when you're not necessarily getting the right support from up above. So it sounds like you're cutting your teeth doing this stuff, man. This is fantastic.   [0:13:24] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And luckily my managers are all great and the people that I work with are all amazing.   [0:13:31] PJ Bruno: Your team has been stoked just watching you the [crosstalk 00:13:33].   [0:13:33] Zoltan Szalas: They're so supportive.   [0:13:35] PJ Bruno: You can't see it.   [0:13:36] Taylor Gibb: Is Savage out there?   [0:13:37] Zoltan Szalas: Savage is not out there. Savage is at TransferWise.   [0:13:41] PJ Bruno: Well Sav, we're thinking of you buddy.   [0:13:43] Zoltan Szalas: We're thinking of you.   [0:13:45] Taylor Gibb: Oh man. So all right. You've got all these different projects that you've done. You've been able to work within IBM using this startup mindset, but also some of the soft skills that you've learned, and it sounds like you're iterating on there. What I'd be most excited to hear about now is anything that you can share that's coming down the pipeline, for either you and your team at IBM or larger initiatives that you're working on. We want to hear what you're excited about.   [0:14:08] Zoltan Szalas: Personally, I'm really excited about quantum computing.   [0:14:12] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah.   [0:14:13] Zoltan Szalas: Especially since the headlines this week that Google is claiming quantum computing supremacy.   [0:14:19] Taylor Gibb: I hadn't seen this, wait.   [0:14:20] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:14:21] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Fill her in.   [0:14:22] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, fill me in on quantum computing. This sounds like Star Trek.   [0:14:25] Zoltan Szalas: It is kind of like Star Trek. So think of the most powerful computer in the world, and X that by 1000 or a million.   [0:14:36] Taylor Gibb: I can't even conceive of it.   [0:14:38] Zoltan Szalas: It's a very strange thing because, unlike traditional computers which work off of a chip, for a quantum computer you're basically emulating an environment where almost atoms and ions are just making the calculations. I mean we haven't been able to run an app on a quantum computer to date, but just kind of Google did something along those lines this past week. But why is that important? The reason that it's important because right now there are so many complex problems out there, whether it's logistics, cyber security, pharmaceuticals, or modeling that even the most powerful computers can't handle those problems. And if quantum computing gets there, we could potentially solve these problems.   [0:15:30] PJ Bruno: Right. You were saying something like a calculation that would normally take weeks or months could be done in seconds, or something like that.   [0:15:38] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. So there's a really interesting article in Tech Crunch that came out. So Google is claiming they're ahead of the game. And what they did is they did a simulation with the most powerful computer that's available in the world. And I'm forgetting, but I think it's at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The supercomputer took something like a week to produce an outcome, where the quantum computer took I think 200 seconds.   [0:16:03] PJ Bruno: Sounds about right.   [0:16:04] Taylor Gibb: Oh my God.   [0:16:05] Zoltan Szalas: So imagine that power.   [0:16:07] Taylor Gibb: This is not a minuscule change. This is going to absolutely turn everything on its head.   [0:16:11] Zoltan Szalas: Absolutely. Especially if you're looking at anything from ... If you're in security, that's troubling.   [0:16:18] PJ Bruno: That's a red flag.   [0:16:20] Zoltan Szalas: You should start preparing now because those quantum computers will just break your encryption like nothing.   [0:16:27] PJ Bruno: Watch yourself.   [0:16:28] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, geez.   [0:16:29] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:16:29] PJ Bruno: Talk about future proofing.   [0:16:30] Taylor Gibb: Yeah seriously.   [0:16:31] Zoltan Szalas: I don't think, I mean you and I, PJ, when we talked that kind of went off crazy philosophical. Like, "Imagine if everybody had this, [inaudible 00:16:38]."   [0:16:37] PJ Bruno: Yeah, we were nerding out. It was not late at night either, it was the middle of the day. Like, "Quantum supremacy, it sounds like the empire. Oh yeah."   [0:16:47] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah. I don't think it'll ever go [inaudible] because I just don't think consumers need that type of computing power. But it's going to be interesting to see what happens when governments get ahold of it, and major corporations get a hold of it.   [0:16:58] PJ Bruno: God save us all.   [0:16:59] Taylor Gibb: And the hands of you at IBM, breaking pages. Be careful over there. Quantum page breaking.   [0:17:06] PJ Bruno: Quantum page break.   [0:17:08] Taylor Gibb: [inaudible 00:17:08]. Oh my God. Well, thank you.   [0:17:09] PJ Bruno: No better way to end it I guess than-   [0:17:11] Taylor Gibb: I was going to say, you've made me excited about what you're excited about here. I'm going to look into quantum computing right after this podcast. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great speaking with you and hearing all about this great stuff.   [0:17:23] Zoltan Szalas: Awesome. This was a lot of fun. Thank you guys for having me.   [0:17:25] Taylor Gibb: Oh definitely.   [0:17:25] PJ Bruno: Absolutely man.   [0:17:26] Taylor Gibb: PJ, as always, thank you so much.   [0:17:28] PJ Bruno: So very welcome. Great to be here.   [0:17:30] Taylor Gibb: And all of you on the line, thanks again for dialing in. This is Taylor Gibb, CSM, Braze for Impact. We'll catch you next time. [0:17:37]

Ashok Rajan, director of the board at Lister Digital and cycling enthusiast, gives commentary on how personalization strategies are more about human connection than technology. He shares a profound customer experience that shaped him, and stresses the importance of "data for purpose." *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to another episode of Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. We're back again with another episode of our humanity series. Our guest today, Ashok Rajan, president of Lister Digital. Ashok, thanks so much for being here.   [0:00:33] Ashok Rajan: Hey, thanks for having me here PJ and Dave. Very excited to be in this conference. Again, longterm relationships man, it's awesome.   [0:00:41] PJ: Let's build them. Let's expand them.   [0:00:43] Ashok Rajan: Let's build them. Let's expand them. And it's about the human experience. I don't see, again I am just free flowing here, that even as I see them live in the conference, it's very exciting. Because you guys are ... I was here last year, felt the same vibe. And it's been more, and because this is what we do as well. Like hey, we deeply care about the customer experience. We're not just sitting in thinking, "Hey, what's the channel?" And so on. You want to treat them like humans. Hey, it's another human that I'm trying to influence to do something. And then I feel like, "Hey, that's the vibe that I sense in the conference. It's very exciting to be here. So thank you.   [0:01:17] PJ: Exactly. And speaking of humans, Ashok and I are with a pretty rad human in my eyes here. And this-   [0:01:23] Dave Goldstein: Here I am again.   [0:01:24] PJ: Our good buddy Dave Goldstein, head of Global Solutions Alliance at Braze. Dave, love you.   [0:01:29] Dave Goldstein: Love to be a part of this.   [0:01:32] Ashok Rajan: [crosstalk] Dave is my cycling brother. We're from the brotherhood of cyclers.   [0:01:36] Dave Goldstein: That's right, that's right.   [0:01:38] Ashok Rajan: I love it man.   [0:01:38] Dave Goldstein: Strong legs in this podcast booth, watch out.   [0:01:40] PJ: If you guys saw the quads I was looking at right now.   [0:01:44] Dave Goldstein: Thousands of miles among us.   [0:01:46] Ashok Rajan: That's right. It's in my to do list to write a LinkedIn article on Zen and the art of cycling, because I think that tells you a lot of a life. Hey, you need to put a lot of effort to climb up the hill, but then no one can take me the love that you feel, the endorphins that you feel when you come downhill man. But you got to work hard. You got to work hard to go up that hill.   [0:02:06] PJ: Why don't you take us back now, Ashok, about 30, 35 years where it all started?   [0:02:13] Ashok Rajan: Absolutely. So now the age part comes in. So I feel young Dave, so thank you for your friendship, and you make me feel young. But now that he mentioned 35 years. I think it's interesting because the background, my background, is that I actually started before the internet. So now, or what was called is the worldwide web, and in client server technology. So client server technology which was used to, again, do a lot of interactions and how to make them easy. I feel life changed when I attended the Windows 95 release in Long Beach. I think I was about three or four years into my work life at that point. But as I was trying to share the story with you, it was a lot of ... I have this principle FSOGSD. Figure stuff out, get stuff done. So the lot of the ... I consider myself a child of the internet, and I had to figure a lot of things out. So one of the first things I would like to share is first piece of code I wrote that actually went live on the web. It was a program called [bannerad.exe 00:03:22]. That's what I called it, but hey, all it had to do was change the banner based on cookie values. So personalize the banner that was being showed. This is 1995. At that point it was Netscape, I think it's called Netscape Commerce Server or something. And then we went live on the web. So we kept building. The goal, I feel, was always how to personalize the experience. How to personalize the experience based on someone's interests. And so we were collecting information, right? So we're collecting all this information on people's interests, but then we're trying to say, "Hey, how can I change the web experience as they land on the web and they move on?" And then over time, I'll keep my background brief, but I was lucky enough to be part of two companies that were acquired. Great teams, a great group of people. First was 2000, I joined this company called Digital Impact, which was 2000 to 2005, Forrester rated top company for email and digital marketing. Then it was acquired by Axiom. And then I joined Responsys in 2010 which was acquired by Oracle. And these were great experiences for me because, again, even I heard this in the conference today, it's sort of exciting to me. "Hey, some of these things we worked on like in 2001, 2002, I was already building recommendation engines."   [0:04:42] Dave Goldstein: What's old is new again.   [0:04:43] Ashok Rajan: What's old is new again. Like hey, some of these concepts, sometimes I laugh. And like, "You guys are talking about stuff." Then I feel like your old guy. Then I feel like the old guy.   [0:04:53] Dave Goldstein: Go back to my bannerad.exe days, right?   [0:04:57] Ashok Rajan: That's right man, that's right. Or even these, some of the challenges that I heard some of the speakers talk about. And these are real companies. So hey, love your speakers in the conference because these are real experiences. They are talking about real world problems. And the challenge hasn't changed, that how do I get data, how do I move these things around? How do I make the optimal decision? And sometimes I feel that, over time as I've observed this, things have changed. Before, there was a time point in time, and I think it will come back in vogue again like bell-bottoms or something. And thankfully I didn't wear them, but I have older siblings that did.   [0:05:39] PJ: It always comes back.   [0:05:39] Ashok Rajan: Older siblings, I've seen them do that. I'm like, "What is that?"   [0:05:41] Dave Goldstein: It's just a matter of time.   [0:05:44] Ashok Rajan: But my point is that there was a phase where I felt that things moved to hyper analytics. Like hey, everything was analytics driven and I want this, but I come from a slightly different school of thought these days. But I feel like there's a sort of, I call this the Heisenberg principle of personalization. If you look at Amazon for instance, they do a lot of real time personalization. Of course the personalization is driven by a deep analytics, but it's not like the analytics are real time. And sometimes I joke with people, I say, "Hey, you're fooling people if you say you're real time analytics," because good analytics means that you have lots of data that you've chunked. Lots of data means it's been collected over a long period of time. And any good statistician will tell you the last day or the last minute's worth of data should not influence your model of things that you've collected over 30 days, one year, whatever the case is. Right? So that means analytics can be run offline, but how I'm treating the customer becomes a ... How do I influence the journey is something that happens more real time.   [0:06:47] PJ: That's an interesting point too, just because we hear all the time, or I personally do, as soon as that data's captured, the value of it will start to decay over time. But that makes so much sense. You should be able to look back at behavior over the past month or even year to kind of like help dictate, or at least inform some things.   [0:07:05] Dave Goldstein: I mean what I found so fascinating actually was just moments ago, Dipanjan Chaterjee from Forrester was presenting his updated research to the brand humanity index. And he was saying that, what is it, 0.5%, a half a percent of all data is actually actioned on. You're actually doing something with that data and doing something meaningful with it. So there's that fine line that you really do have to walk, right? Like you can collect just this wealth of data. But I suppose the key to that is to action on as much of it as you can, because what is data without appropriate action?   [0:07:43] Ashok Rajan: No, absolutely. I think Dave, I think this is a great segue because if you start thinking about the platforms and what's the newer generation platforms versus some of the older generation platforms that you have, the thinking, and some of these ideas were regurgitated before. I sort of joke about this and I say, "Hey, you don't bring the mountain to Moses, Moses goes to the mountain." And I use this these days with big data, right? With the proliferation of big data. I feel it's actually a simple engineering problem. The more data that I collect, the more difficult it is going to be for me to move it across systems. To move everything and start duplicating it is just a mindless exercise of, it's expensive, it's too late, it takes time to action. And how quickly you respond becomes more crucial. And so what I find exciting about platforms like Braze is that foundationally it's been built to handle that issue. That it's not now anymore like the old school, "Hey, why don't you give me everything?" I just remember with [inaudible 00:08:54], one of my previous companies since I've already mentioned who they are. I was sitting Nordstrom, and this is a true story. And then the guy was like, "Hey." I'm like, "Hey, give me all your data. Give me all of it." He says, "It's fine. I'll give you all my data. How many years of data do you want?" I said, "I'll take how much you can give me." He says, "Okay, I'm going to give you 10 years worth of data." But here he says, "I'm going to warn you. What's the database that you use behind the scenes?" I said, "So we have an Oracle database." I said, "Hey, I just spent like $15 million replacing my Oracle database with [inaudible] data, so you better have some big system. And I don't think we're paying you guys that much to basically send email marketing campaigns." And they're like, "Hold on. Don't give me any data. I don't want all your data. I only want what's required for my marketing." I think that-   [0:09:42] Dave Goldstein: Data for purpose.   [0:09:43] Ashok Rajan: Data for purpose. And I think that's a big theme of what I like about Braze. When I look at it, okay, it actually goes back to, "Hey, I'm only bringing Moses to the mountain for salvation, or whatever." He comes to the burning bush for that particular aspect. It's not like, hey now I'm trying to move the entire mountain and say, "Hey, let me get it to your camp, and then you can figure out what you want." It's like, "Okay, it's not going to work."   [0:10:07] PJ: Right right.   [0:10:08] Ashok Rajan: I think that's a big point.   [0:10:10] PJ: Yeah. People just assume sometimes the data equals value, so just give me all the stuff you have, but that can really put this opaque kind of lens over what your goals are. It gives you a little bit more confusion I think.   [0:10:22] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm fascinated by the paradigm shift that's happened in my own mind since starting to work in this industry almost a decade ago. I walked into a retail store recently whose mobile app I had on my phone. I had given them push notification permissions, they had my email, they had preferences about me, they had my location permissions as well. I live on Long Island so I actually go to a shopping mall. Yeah, I'm a mall walking dad, I'll admit it. And so I [inaudible] the store and of course my expectation, living in the age that we do and being in the space that I'm in, is that, "Hey, what a great opportunity for a geo targeted appropriate message based on the data that this brand understands about me." Right? Of course, nothing happened. But I entered the store nonetheless, because I'm a fan of the brand, as it were. And as I'm entering the store, there's a sales associate at the front standing with a stack of printed cards, the kind where you take your thumb nail or a coin and you scratch them off. And it's like, "Hey, it's a take a scratch off, chance to win X percent off anything in the store today only." So I grabbed the card and I scratch it off and I got 15% off. And of course I'm looking around the store and I was like, "Don't really see anything I want today. I'm not compelled to even use this." And so I kind of walk out, and as I'm walking out I throw it in the trash, right. It just occurs to me like, "Wow, what a missed opportunity. If that experience had been digital, imagine how they could have continued that. They would have known just so much, that I had redeemed and I had this 15% off coupon, and maybe it could have extended to online and other channels.   [0:12:03] PJ: Yeah.   [0:12:04] Dave Goldstein: How much did they spend to print those cards? And so there's this whole paradigm shift that I've had as I've kind of thought about how brands can leverage the data that they have about people. And I'm sure the brands that you work with and how you think about coaching them to best leverage the data they have and truly digitally transform, you must see this stuff all the time and have to think-   [0:12:25] Ashok Rajan: No I'm like, "Hey, my brain's racing actually." I want to share something with you as well. It's interesting, Dave, that you bring this up because you're so spot on. I think there's two aspects to it. And this is where I feel again, you guys are in not ... Braze is not just using buzzwords. I think, again, hey, this is not a shameless plug for Braze, I hope it means something to the people who listen that I truly see this. When you talk about the human aspect of things, you talked about the brand humanity index. And I saw this last year, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm on board this train." I want to share something with you that Nordstrom to me has been the brand, at least personally, we would read books on the Nordstrom [inaudible 00:13:12], that you talk about true customer service. And I'm saying like hey, when you really forget all the tech part first. But you say, "Hey, what's fascinating about Nordstrom's customer service?" And so hey, [inaudible] you would read about all these business cases of, "Hey, they changed the tires for some old lady who drove 50 miles to change some clothes." And they say-   [0:13:31] Dave Goldstein: Accept all returns from other stores. I remember that. Yeah.   [0:13:33] Ashok Rajan: And sometimes it feels like some urban legend or something right? But I want to share my personal experience with you, which I have now used in the digital aspect. So my personal experience with Nordstrom, again, I love, hey there's something a little bit about me, is when I work with brands, I love to see what it is that they do in their store. So as soon as I started working with Nordstrom, I started shopping at Nordstrom. And man it was interesting, first time I walked around the ... This is, again, 2011. Things are different now. So I'm walking around the store and this guy is just quietly following me around, didn't speak much, but he was just paying attention to what I was doing. And then what he did is, he didn't say anything. And then he said, "Hey, can I have your number?" I didn't buy anything. This was in the men's section where they have all the good stuff. And so then I said, "Okay fine, you can have my number." He says, "I'll just give you a call if I find something that you like." And I said, "How the heck would he know?" So I was, look again, curiosity killed the cat. I'm like, "I'm curious to know how the heck you know what I like, because I didn't speak to you." So then I gave him my number. And then believe it or not, Dave, he calls me after like a couple of weeks. He says, "Hey, I think I picked like two shirts for you. I think you're really going to like this." I go, "Okay, you have me. I'm going to come to the store." And guess what? He's like, "Michael Kors, here's the two shirts I think that will fit you perfectly. Go wear them." And then suddenly what happens is, this is the relationship I had with this guy, that at one point you would laugh, my wardrobe probably had like a dozen Michael Kors shirts.   [0:15:02] Dave Goldstein: Get out of here.   [0:15:03] Ashok Rajan: I kept all ... He would keep calling me every two months, and he would say, "Hey, I think I have something that you would like." I would go back, the fit would be great. And then it didn't stop until Michael Kors decided to move and start selling those shirts in their own store. But then this guy didn't let me go, right? So for me, I latch onto the concept of, "Hey, personalization is the human experience. Somebody was paying attention." And then of course, again, I was working with the Nordstrom marketing team. I was like, "Hey, you guys should do this." Fast forward to then I'm consulting with Adidas. And then Adidas basically says, "Hey, we have this ..." this is the guy that was running marketing for Adidas in India. And then he goes, "Hey, I want to change the customer experience. What do you think I can do?" I said, "Hey, have you considered this? Like put iPads in all your stores." And I shared with him the Nordstrom experience, but except now this was happening four years after the Nordstrom experience. And I'm saying, Hey, maybe you should have your salespeople just follow around and see what kind of shoes they're looking at. And then see what happens, then put everything, capture this information. Don't let them know. But then, like hey, just ask them, "Hey, would you like to know that if you really liked those Adidas shoes that you were looking at, running shoes, may I call you back if I find something that you like?" And then he calls me. The next year I meet him at the Oracle conference and he's super excited. He's like, "Hey, every store has an iPad, and this thing is working like crazy. Right?" Again, we're talking about stuff that's 2015, 2016. And here what I love about what Brace and what you're doing is hey, now we're talking about location based listing. Now we're talking about hyper personalization. Still the human experience doesn't go away.   [0:16:38] PJ: How did he know your size? He just was looking at you and he was like, "I got your number dude."   [0:16:43] Ashok Rajan: That's right. He's got my number. And I tell you like, hey, shame that the part that they didn't do well, like Hey I get that what he wants from me is not [inaudible] on Nordstrom is when that person left, he didn't capture that information and leave it somewhere. Unfortunately, I live in the Bay Area, I shop in the Hillsdale Mall, and this guy moved to the South Bay. And I'm like, "I'm not chasing you to South Bay to buy my clothes. I'm like, "Ah, okay." But you're right. Like he was actually sizing me up. And so this is somebody who knew his craft obviously. But that's when I feel that, I'm an old school techie, the more things move digital, I still love the relationship aspect. Relationship doesn't mean it's ... I feel it's about paying attention, it's about listening to people, quietly observing them. So the first thing that you need to do is, hey, you need to listen. There's three aspects that I feel to how things should work. First thing is you need to listen. And you need to listen, but then the next thing is you need to be able to analyze. And the third thing is you need to be able to act quickly. So you guys didn't put me up to this, but hey, when I look at a platform like Brace compared to something else, now you have web services. I can quickly listen to things. The data modeling is super simple. So now I can basically capture the information I need. I can analyze this quickly, and then I can act quickly to send you a push notification. Or send you an email message, or whatever it is that is the right communication style. I think people are ... In general, I hope people realize this, I think people underestimate. That's where I think is the real power of the Braze platform, that it brings things together.   [0:18:16] Dave Goldstein: Fantastic context. It's interesting, I was thinking about there's a lot of legacy technology out there. Sunk costs, if you will, whereby folks know it's just not getting the job done. It's no longer fit for purpose. They're afraid of change for a number of reasons, whether it be the money that they've sunk into it, whether it be the fear of moving to new technology and potential hiccups in business. Do you have a philosophy or a methodology that you use to help quell people's fears about, "I'm on this legacy technology that's just not ... It's clearly not working. And the whole team hates using it. We all know there's ... We all hope there's something better out there." How do you talk to those people? How do you actually help them transform and move into the new mobile first era, if you will?   [0:19:12] Ashok Rajan: What we like to tell people is that, "Hey look, you have someone like Lister that basically has worked with multiple platforms. We have helped build those platforms. We have the talent and the technology to basically drive these things. And the newer platforms are actually built for absorbing things quickly." So we're here to help them, and then we have really good success stories to show clients that, "Hey, it's not as daunting as you think". As long as, "Hey, you focus on the marketing." Someone say, hey, this is one of my mentors. And I really respect him. He said this a long time back in the conference. [inaudible] I say, "Hey, who was your biggest competition?" And he says, "My IT team."   [0:20:00] Dave Goldstein: Wow.   [0:20:00] Ashok Rajan: I thought that was the most profound thing that I heard so far. And it's like, "Yeah, amen to that. That's right." Because then, that's why when you bring people that already know how to work with these multiple platforms, then the migration is not such a daunting task. When we have done this day in and day out and we understand the nuances. We have done this successfully in the past and we feel that ... There's two things, right? It's not just about my talent or my team. I'm also saying that platforms like Brace, you make it easy to migrate, but the daunting part is unfortunately it's marchitecture. There is a technology aspect to it, but if you're used to classic database tables and operations, now suddenly you need to learn to work with unstructured data. My advice, or Dave, or my answer is quite simple, right? First, enlist in the right platform. I think these platforms are built for purpose. And they really leapfrog you from where you are to where you need to be. And then finding a great partner I think is important that has done this before and that can easily say, "Okay, I know you liked apples before, but now you have a vitamin C deficiency." And, "Hey, I'm here from Florida to make your orange juice."   [0:21:15] PJ: Amazing.   [0:21:15] Dave Goldstein: I know you liked meat before, but here's some kale.   [0:21:18] PJ: Exactly.   [0:21:19] Ashok Rajan: Exactly.   [0:21:19] PJ: That's beauty. Honestly, no better way to wrap it up than that.   [0:21:22] Dave Goldstein: That was great.   [0:21:22] PJ: Ashok, thanks so much for being here. And Dave, as always, thanks for joining me.   [0:21:27] Dave Goldstein: It's my pleasure. And Ashok, really, I can't say it enough. It's brilliant to have you as part of our community, and we're just so happy to have you as part of this solutions partner ecosystem. You add so much value to the overall landscape. And yeah, we love working with you. So thank you.   [0:21:43] Ashok Rajan: Thanks, thanks Dave. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. Really appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to working with you guys.   [0:21:49] PJ: And thank you guys all for listening. Take care. [0:21:51]

Collette Mosca, Lead CRM at Busuu, talks mission for global connection and the guided approach of the beloved language learning platform.  *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry Discuss Digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and we are here at LTR 2019. I'm so happy to have with me our first guest of the day, Collette Mosca from Busuu. Welcome.   [0:00:34] Collette Mosca: Hey. Thanks for having me.   [0:00:36] PJ Bruno: Absolutely. Thanks for coming into our little covert booth here. And also to my right, a very good friend of mine and coworker at Braze on the success org, Taylor Gibb. Thanks for coming.   [0:00:46] Taylor Gibb: Well, thank you so much for having me. We're sitting here at LTR in this little kind of submarine. I'm feeling very cool. I like it.   [0:00:52] PJ Bruno: Collette, really great giving us her time. Lead CRM Manager at Busuu. For those of you who don't know, Busuu is a language learning platform for web, iOS, and Android. Is there anything else I should add to that, Collette?   [0:01:06] Collette Mosca: No, that's pretty much exactly what it is.   [0:01:07] PJ Bruno: That's pretty much it?   [0:01:08] Collette Mosca: Yeah.   [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: Great. And so she's coming here to share with us a little bit more about Busuu, and her time there, and the human factor. This is kind of the theme for this series in general, talking about how we can still have a tech stack that has thoughts toward attribution, analytics, and action, but also a little layer of love along the way, too.   [0:01:29] Taylor Gibb: A layer of love. That's what we're going for here at LTR.   [0:01:32] PJ Bruno: I think that's important.   [0:01:32] Taylor Gibb: And nothing says love like languages, right? Or at least you can't say that you're in love with someone unless you're using their language. Which is the reason a lot of people choose to learn a language, I've heard around the grapevine. I don't know Collette, if you have a lot of love connection through people who learn the same language. You're bilingual yourself.   [0:01:49] Collette Mosca: Yes. Yeah, it's quite interesting actually, because we do get our users contacting us and saying that sometimes they found love through our app, which is amazing.   [0:02:00] PJ Bruno: From a trainer?   [0:02:02] Collette Mosca: Yeah, through the app itself. Because one of the features that we have is conversations. So you can link up with native users. So if you're learning English, you can link up with English native speakers, and do exchanges on that. So we have had a couple of love stories on the app.   [0:02:22] PJ Bruno: I love it. So let's dig into that a little bit more. Because maybe the more old school training systems, when it comes to learning languages, it's not so much based in community, it's more like here's a module, here's what you learn. But Busuu more or less from the start was based around a community, right?   [0:02:39] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so one of our biggest aims is to break down language barriers. And the way we do that is through a number of different ways. But also we have built this Busuu language community, and it's a native community. So what you do is you choose what language you want to learn, but also you're a native speaker as well. And the aim is that you can connect with people in the app, and also help each other learn each other's languages. And so it's all about building a community and learning a language together.   [0:03:12] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:03:13] PJ Bruno: And I love that along with the idea of community and building a language, you guys are very concerned with the communication that goes out with the company, and how you can foster that feeling of community, and the basic mission of Busuu. So how do you go about that? How do you choose messaging that reflects that mission of community?   [0:03:35] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so we try to be as personalized as we can with the information that we have. And also we use email in-app and push. And again we try and choose the right channels at the right time when it suits someone. So for example, one of our features that we launched, which is the study plan, we get told when someone wants to study, at what time, and the frequency. So we choose when to message people based on what they give us to try and give that personalized touch rather than ... Say if someone says they want to study three times a week at 6:00 PM, then we'll send them reminders at that time rather than every day be like, "Oh, can you study?" No, we'll do it based on what they've said.   [0:04:25] PJ Bruno: Makes sense.   [0:04:25] Taylor Gibb: That's great. And that really does make it feel like human coming from you as well, right? You're connecting with other people, but at the same time you're providing this information to Busuu as a brand, saying, "Here's when I'd like to study. Do with this information what you will." And it sounds like you've made some really great personalized tailored messaging in the form of push and email based on that. And I may be jumping the gun a little, but I also heard through the grapevine that you guys are nominated for one of these very personalized messages for a campaign award here.   [0:04:54] Collette Mosca: Yeah. No, we're really excited about that. It's a campaign that actually took us a lot of time to do, and it's building on from the study plan, where we were getting a lot more data on our learners. And we wanted to really embrace that data and target the message a lot better to our users. So apart from day and time, they also tell us why they want to study. So again, we made some subtle changes. But for example, for people who want to learn for travel, or if they want to learn for work, we've tried to slightly change the messaging to suit that particular user more. And yeah, it's made huge improvements. And we're really excited about the award actually, because it was a lot of effort. We brought in Connected Content with that just to make it really in real-time data. And once we launched that we saw really huge improvements. So it's nice to be recognized for it.   [0:05:51] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:05:51] PJ Bruno: The coveted Torchy Award.   [0:05:52] Taylor Gibb: That's it. Absolutely.   [0:05:54] PJ Bruno: They only give out five a year.   [0:05:56] Taylor Gibb: It's true.   [0:05:57] Collette Mosca: There's only five?   [0:05:57] PJ Bruno: Or ever, because we've never done it before.   [0:05:58] Collette Mosca: Oh really?   [0:05:58] Taylor Gibb: That's what they say. You're going to be one of the first five in history.   [0:06:02] PJ Bruno: That's a big deal.   [0:06:03] Taylor Gibb: Very, very exciting. And I love the subtle shout out to Connected Content there. It's one of, I think, most dynamic features of Braze. It sounds like you're using it in a really thoughtful way. Bringing that in at the time of send. Now, I hope you don't mind if I ask, when you say you've been able to see great results from this kind of campaign, what kind of things are you looking at? It obviously opens on things, obviously engagement. But is there any sort of other measure you're looking to you to make sure that a campaign was successful?   [0:06:32] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so retention is a big one for us. So basically them coming back into the app more frequently. For this campaign, one thing that we did change is we noticed that initially ... It's interesting because people will say, "Oh, when do you want to study? For what time?" and stuff. And people are very optimistic to begin with.   [0:06:52] Taylor Gibb: Oh, well absolutely.   [0:06:53] Collette Mosca: So they're like, "I want to study every single day for an hour at a time-"   [0:06:57] Taylor Gibb: 6:00 AM.   [0:06:57] Collette Mosca: Yeah. Literally they're very enthusiastic.   [0:07:00] PJ Bruno: Very easy to make a routine.   [0:07:01] Collette Mosca: Yeah. And I guess when they put such high standards, it's easy to kind of drop off. So we try to notice when people weren't meeting their goals. So we then again changed the messaging to kind of, rather than just saying we send a weekly report out, and rather than just saying, "Oh you've done zero this week," which can be quite depressing. We changed it. And so rather than saying you've done zero, we kind of changed the message and made it more encouraging, and trying to get them back into it. Or, for example, if they said that they wanted to learn every single day for an hour, and we could see that they're not doing that, we would encourage them to amend their study plans to make it more realistic to them. And in doing that, we saw a huge improvement in terms of retention. So getting people back into it. Because obviously it's a bit depressing seeing an email which just says zero. So we tried to remove that, and we really saw a big increase in retention from that.   [0:08:06] PJ Bruno: So updating that study plan was like a conversion event that you guys looked to.   [0:08:10] Collette Mosca: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.   [0:08:11] Taylor Gibb: Wow. That is so cool. And I must say, as someone who has an inbox littered with 0.0 days this week from perhaps other language learning systems, I'm excited to give Busuu a try. The other thing that really intrigued me is that you do have, I believe, programs or at least distinct messaging for kind of learning for the workplace. Which you alluded to a little bit earlier. Have there been challenges that come alongside that in messaging for people who are maybe learning to fall in love or travel, and then people who are doing it to try to perhaps get another job?   [0:08:42] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so for the workplace, it's one of our biggest reasons actually, if people want to study. And mainly that's English, globally. It does change, but generally it's English. What we've done is we actually have specific courses for business English. So looking at particular vocab that you would need in the workplace, and just vocalizing on that. And again, we've seen that very bespoke targeted vocab which someone needs has been really helpful for them to reach their goals. We do also offer a B2B arm of Busuu in the same light. Because obviously breaking down language barriers isn't just an individual thing, but it's also from a business perspective. And having that language fluidity in the workplace is really important. So we now offer that as a feature from a B2B side. And yeah, It's a very similar tool in terms of that you have from a B2B side, but we offer the insights from an employee perspective as well.   [0:09:57] PJ Bruno: Is there also a community aspect to that B2B side?   [0:10:00] Collette Mosca: Yeah, it's exactly the same. It's exactly the same. So we don't differentiate that at all. The only difference is from a B2B side, you have a few more features. So for example, we have a bespoke retail course. We have a lot of retail clients. So you can imagine someone who works at Zara or somewhere like that, they deal with different nationalities on a day to day basis. And it's really important for our clients to be able to speak to their customers. And so Busuu offers that capability.   [0:10:31] PJ Bruno: Do those bigger companies like Zara, do they feel the need to vet the teachers in some way?   [0:10:39] Collette Mosca: So we don't have teachers on Busuu. So it's all a language app. We have an education team that builds the courses, but we don't have individual teachers.   [0:10:52] PJ Bruno: Gotcha. Okay, cool.   [0:10:53] Taylor Gibb: That's great. And so you guys are enabling, through your app, other retailers, other businesses to succeed and to become more human in turn with your humanity? This is a double down on everything we're preaching here at LTR. And I have to say personally, the aspect where you can communicate with other people who speak the language, and really hear and see the way that they use it is a game changer. I tried to learn Mandarin for years. I'm still very bad at it. And I remember one case in which I was trying to tell someone I was really full from lunch, and I kept telling them that I was a dumpling. And so anything to do to alleviate those little tiny things. I think it's just unbelievable.   [0:11:36] PJ Bruno: You know what I'm actually curious about is there's always new words popping up all the time. And so does that create a ton of conflict? Just because here's an example, you know we have our own terms for our stuff. Like a "multi-step campaign journey" is canvas, right? And so we were considering taking our documentation and using Google translate. But Google translate will just make up words for things in Mandarin or in Japanese. So I'm sure you've come up against that a lot.   [0:12:04] Collette Mosca: Yeah. And this is where, like I said, we have an in house education team that basically their job is on a day to day basis to look at the course, and to amend it. And also our users are amazing. They'll contact us even with a slight thing to let us know if something isn't right, or if they'd like to see more of something else. And we're constantly taking that on board and trying to amend our course so it's the most useful as it can be. And it's funny, even within languages you have very different variations. So for example, if you learn Spanish on our app, we'll also tell you the difference between Spanish in South America, and Spanish in Spain. Because you have very different forms of language within the two. So we'll often say, "Okay, well you need to use this formal tense in Spain, but in South America you don't. You'd use this." And we kind of try and use both aspects because obviously, as you mentioned before, it's not just you have English and that's it. You have very, very different variations of English. And it's the same for most languages as well.   [0:13:15] PJ Bruno: I've got to say, it's kind of inspiring to see the position that you're in, being a bilingual person coming from Italy, growing up in the UK, right?   [0:13:24] Collette Mosca: Yeah.   [0:13:24] PJ Bruno: I mentioned earlier Simon Sinek. In the new book that he has out he talks about kind of how you can motivate a workplace and people to kind of just go beyond what you'd expect from them. And it's a just cause, having that cause, having that mission. And it sounds like your personal mission aligns very well with Busuu's. So ...   [0:13:42] Collette Mosca: Yeah. No, definitely. I was very fortunate because I was brought up bilingual. So I know a lot of people when I say this to people that are a bit jealous of it.   [0:13:52] PJ Bruno: I'm jealous just sitting here.   [0:13:52] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:13:52] Collette Mosca: But I was fortunate. Yeah, I was fortunate. But in that, to me it's normal to have two languages, and I think it's important as the world evolves that you have more interconnections with different languages and different cultures. So knowing different languages is so important. And obviously the mission of Busuu is to break down language barriers. So it kind of just fits.   [0:14:18] PJ Bruno: And so when it comes to the World Cup, is it Italy or is it England?   [0:14:21] Collette Mosca: Yeah, I'm Italy. Yeah.   [0:14:25] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:14:25] Taylor Gibb: Oh my gosh. Controversial.   [0:14:27] Collette Mosca: Yeah. This is a common thing.   [0:14:29] PJ Bruno: Let me know if I need to edit this out later.   [0:14:30] Collette Mosca: No, no, that's absolutely fine. But yeah, all my English friends are always ... Because I moved to England when I was six, so pretty much most of my life. And obviously I sound like this, I have a very strong English accent. But I would always say I'm Italian. So it's always strange for ... Yeah. So, Italian football team. Yeah.   [0:14:55] PJ Bruno: Let's go. Italia.   [0:14:56] Collette Mosca: It's good because they are better so than the English team.   [0:14:59] Taylor Gibb: That worked out well.   [0:14:59] PJ Bruno: They do have a better track record, that's for sure.   [0:15:01] Taylor Gibb: It worked out in your favor on that one.   [0:15:02] Collette Mosca: Yeah, exactly.   [0:15:03] PJ Bruno: All right. Well, thanks so much for being here, Collette. Just wrapping up, anything big that we should look to see from you guys in terms of initiatives, what's something new for you that you're really excited about for the next plateau for you guys?   [0:15:17] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so the main focus coming up is really taking what we did with the study plan with using the Connected Content, really highly personalized things, and kind of moving that into other campaigns in the coming months. So that's a real focus. But then also we want to extend our channels. So SMS is about to be launched.   [0:15:38] PJ Bruno: Here we go.   [0:15:39] Collette Mosca: Yeah, so we've never done that at Busuu. So we really want to try it and see how our customers react to it. Because we do have a lot, especially in Asia, that would register with their phone rather than email. So we see it as a huge opportunity for us to communicate in a different channel to our users.   [0:15:59] PJ Bruno: Big time. You've got to do it. I love expanding into SMS. I'm excited about it. Taylor, excited?   [0:16:03] Taylor Gibb: Very excited. I love different languages, different channels. You guys are reaching people where they want to be reached the way that they want to be. This is what I preach as a success manager all day, every day.   [0:16:13] PJ Bruno: Collette, thanks so much for being with us.   [0:16:15] Collette Mosca: Thank you.   [0:16:15] Taylor Gibb: It was so good to meet you.   [0:16:16] Collette Mosca: Thank you, lovely to meet you both.   [0:16:17] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, yeah.   [0:16:18] PJ Bruno: Taylor, thanks for riding shotgun.   [0:16:19] Taylor Gibb: Hey, anytime you want me to be in this spookily-lit booth, I will join you. And Collette, you'd better come back here sometime, too.   [0:16:25] PJ Bruno: Please do.   [0:16:26] Collette Mosca: Will do. Thank you.   [0:16:26] PJ Bruno: All right. And thank you guys for joining us. Take care. [0:16:29]

Global Head of CRM at JustEat, Marie Feliho, shares with us how use of data has evolved throughout her career, the future of email, and how the skills needed to be an effective marketer are changing. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:19] PJ Bruno: And we're back again.   [0:00:20] Marie Feliho: Jason. Jason.   [0:00:21] PJ Bruno: Braze for Impact, your MarTech Industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno. So thrilled to be here today with our guest, Marie Feliho, Global Head of CRM at Just Eat. Marie, thanks for being here.   [0:00:33] Marie Feliho: Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Short notice. And to my right, very good friend, confidant, coworker from our success org, Taylor Gibb.   [0:00:41] Taylor Gibb: Happy to be a confidant and very happy to be joining today.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: And a friend.   [0:00:46] Taylor Gibb: And a friend. Yeah, that's what comes first I think.   [0:00:48] PJ Bruno: I think so too.   [0:00:48] Taylor Gibb: And then you can confide in me. You know, any of you guys.   [0:00:52] Marie Feliho: I really want to join that love that-   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're in. You're in.   [0:00:55] Taylor Gibb: You're in.   [0:00:56] PJ Bruno: You're in the bubble. When you're in the booth you're family.   [0:01:00] Taylor Gibb: When you're in the booth you're a confidant. And so we're here-   [0:01:00] Marie Feliho: Okay, good.   [0:01:00] Taylor Gibb: Is that Olive Garden?   [0:01:02] PJ Bruno: Shh. No. She doesn't know Olive Garden commercials. She's not from this country.   [0:01:06] Taylor Gibb: Oh shoot. Oh that's right. I forgot.   [0:01:07] Marie Feliho: Okay. I see.   [0:01:09] Taylor Gibb: That's totally original.   [0:01:10] PJ Bruno: So this is another episode from our humanity series. And as part of the humanity series, we're just here to talk about what makes your automation, your MarTech stack, whatever you may call it, your personalization, what makes it human. We decided to not do much structuring with this. So we're just going to freewheel and deal it. What do you think Taylor?   [0:01:30] Taylor Gibb: I think that's great.   [0:01:32] PJ Bruno: Marie, what do you think?   [0:01:33] Marie Feliho: I think that's a perfect plan.   [0:01:34] PJ Bruno: That sounds like the most human thing to me.   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: The best plan is no plan.   [0:01:38] PJ Bruno: Well, let's hear first about your journey that brought you to Just Eat, Marie. Was it always marketing technology prior to or have you coasted around?   [0:01:47] Marie Feliho: For most of my career really I've been working with data and creativity. So sort of started, I started in advertising, a little bit of media. And then I sort of discovered database marketing, which sort of sounds a little bit dry like that, but actually you can be super creative with that and really sort of think about the ways of turning data into useful stuff for people.   [0:02:18] PJ Bruno: Was it like that when you came to the game? Just because now data and creativity, like you need them to coexist, but I feel like there was a time when they were separate houses.   [0:02:29] Marie Feliho: Feels like it was a long time ago now, back in 2005.   [0:02:31] PJ Bruno: We need to say, okay you did it.   [0:02:34] Taylor Gibb: When red flag-   [0:02:35] Marie Feliho: Back in 2005, so I sort of really got into it when I joined a global company called AIMIA. They used to have the Nectar card. The Nectar card is a loyalty program. It's a coalition program that brings together a whole lot of retailers, physical retailers, but also [inaudible] and you earn points every time you buy something.   [0:02:58] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:02:58] Taylor Gibb: It's still around, right?   [0:03:00] Marie Feliho: Yeah, it's still around. Yeah. Yeah.   [0:03:02] Taylor Gibb: Ah, I had that when I was still in London. I am not the only one who hasn't been to London here. I was [crosstalk]   [0:03:06] Marie Feliho: Yeah, yeah. And back then it was a, now you find a lot of those cards but back then was quite pioneering. And I suppose it was very much leveraging all the data that we got from customers. Can you imagine with like, I think we had about 20 different retailers, half of the UK households had the card. So a lot of data to play with. And at Nectar, it was already the way things were, as in you had to think about how to use your data in a way that was personalized and that could really make a difference in driving incremental revenue for the partners who were a part of it.   [0:03:38] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:03:39] Marie Feliho: And what it didn't want to see was what they could do. You had to be creative with the way you were using it.   [0:03:44] PJ Bruno: And back then it was a little more analog, right?   [0:03:46] Marie Feliho: Yes.   [0:03:46] PJ Bruno: Because today it's all stitched together-   [0:03:48] Marie Feliho: Yes. Absolutely.   [0:03:48] PJ Bruno: ... It's triggered. You were like looking at data and trying to make decisions.   [0:03:52] Marie Feliho: Exactly. And it was a lot more sort of DM based, like paper-based. Yeah. That was the big difference back then. It was definitely less images, sort of action trigger. It wasn't based on all these people buy these and this is what they like. And so-   [0:04:06] PJ Bruno: Time to value was just a different game back then.   [0:04:08] Marie Feliho: Yeah. Yeah, it was a completely. So I would say that this is probably the biggest difference to a few years ago when I started.   [0:04:14] PJ Bruno: And so you've been at Just Eat for?   [0:04:16] Marie Feliho: So I've been at Just Eat a year. And when I look back at all the stuff we've done, it already feels like I've been there for like five really. My role there at Just Eat is very much around the transformation in our customer engagement strategy. So with all these data we wanted to make sure that we were just moving away from just doing email marketing and a little bit of push because that is not what customer engagement is. The guys were already doing quite a lot of personalization but it wasn't really, it was about taking to the next level, bringing it to a multichannel, ensuring that there was a cohesion between what we're doing when we're sending comes to customers and what they were experiencing when they came to the product. So it's been about breaking down the way we're used to working and bringing people together. And when I look at how much we have done in such a short period of time, yeah, I'm very impressed. And it sort of goes to show that once you start bringing humanity and people at the center of what you do, everything sort of falls into place.   [0:05:12] Taylor Gibb: And I'd actually be curious too, so you started back when things were a little more analog. You said even paper-based.   [0:05:18] Marie Feliho: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:05:18] Taylor Gibb: Did bringing any of that wisdom into a company that's using, it sounds like top of the line stack, obviously you've got Braze involved. Were you able to bring any of the wisdom and the things that you'd learned previously into all of this new technology?   [0:05:30] Marie Feliho: Yeah. I think you do. I mean especially when you work for a business that has got so much data. I think that was really the main thing, how best to use the data to turn them into something that's useful for customers, and that's what we're doing. Back then the channels were slightly different. The timing were a bit different. But for me, when I look back, this was probably the best school to sort of learn your craft. Because, again, it was all around customers, customers' behavior, buying behavior, visiting behavior, how they behave when they went to a pub, and all of that coming together meant that you could easily get lost into so much data. But instead what we were doing back then, already, was putting the right bits of information to create a bit of a story for the customer. So I would say that this is the sort of thing of that I brought with me along the years. [crosstalk]   [0:06:27] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, you're classically trained. And that's where that creativity comes in too, it sounds like it's finding those bits of data that are going to be the most, I don't know, impactful and then bringing them into that user profile.   [0:06:35] PJ Bruno: And that passion that you have around it, that lights me up. That lights a fire in me seriously.   [0:06:41] Taylor Gibb: Totally. What could be more human?   [0:06:42] PJ Bruno: And you were just on a panel with Andrew Barrett.   [0:06:44] Marie Feliho: Yeah. We were talking about the future of email marketing. And it is a super interesting sphere to look into because things are changing so fast. Our customers are ever more savvy. You get so many emails through your inbox. For us, it's very much about how do we stand out, how do we build that relationship that's going to make them feel like they want to open your email over somebody else's? Right. And for me it's again bringing that humanity that sort of like, you get me, I get you. I want to have that conversation. And so that's the sort of thing to where we were talking about, we are still using emails a lot. But in the way that we are now approaching it, it is one element of the entire journey as opposed to sort of looking at it in isolation.   [0:07:32] Taylor Gibb: Totally.   [0:07:32] Marie Feliho: So yeah, there's a lot of super exciting stuff to be done around around the emails. I know for sure that we've had a lot of fun in bringing all that personalization through, with understanding what customers like to eat, what they're most likely to order next, et cetera, et cetera. [inaudible]   [0:07:53] PJ Bruno: Yeah, Andrew likes to talk about, his big thing that I've heard him say time and time again. It's like, "Email hasn't changed a lot. It's still one of the top channels. IP warming has been a thing for a while." And all this. Right? But I got to argue that email has changed a lot in the past.   [0:08:12] Marie Feliho: I think emails have changed a lot. [crosstalk 00:08:12].   [0:08:12] PJ Bruno: Right? And now we're in the world of interactive emails and is that on your radar? Are you guys-   [0:08:17] Marie Feliho: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we are in the game to be the best, but not just for vanity sake, but for the sake of our customers. We want to make sure that they feel like we've got what they need whenever they need it. So, yes, it has changed. I mean I look back at even even a few years ago you would just get batch and blast, like the same emails over and over again.   [0:08:40] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:08:40] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:08:40] Marie Feliho: And you can see that brands are changing. They're putting more emphasis on understanding their data and making things more personalized. So I would even say that customers are expecting that level of personalization.   [0:08:53] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:08:55] Marie Feliho: And it's very much a question of sort of be relevant or be gone.   [0:08:59] PJ Bruno: Oh, yeah.   [0:09:00] Marie Feliho: That's the way, that's the way it is.   [0:09:01] Taylor Gibb: I like that.   [0:09:01] Marie Feliho: So that's what me and my team are working on, sort of pushing that relevance. How do we harness machine learning AI to get more of that in, like be there at the right time through the right channel. And I feel like machine learning is sort of our gateway towards getting a bit closer to that sort of Holy grail of [crosstalk 00:09:25].   [0:09:25] PJ Bruno: Yeah, yeah, yeah.   [0:09:26] Marie Feliho: ... Right time, right content [crosstalk 00:09:27].   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: And it all ends with Terminator 3, as we all know.   [0:09:30] Taylor Gibb: That's right.   [0:09:31] PJ Bruno: The robots taking over.   [0:09:32] Taylor Gibb: That's the step three, robot overlords.   [0:09:33] Marie Feliho: I don't believe that, you see. I really don't believe that because I think you will still need a human at the backend of all that, because you're still talking about emotions and also ideas. But it's just that our jobs will change likely.   [0:09:50] Taylor Gibb: Sure.   [0:09:50] Marie Feliho: Likely a lot, it'd be more about, we'll be spending more time trying to think about how to perfect things, how to get the machine to understand the human emotions a bit more.   [0:10:01] PJ Bruno: I wish we had more time now. This is just, this is my [crosstalk 00:10:03].   [0:10:05] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:10:05] PJ Bruno: But in the token, I'm going to ask your question back to you. Like how can we look to the future, right? What are some of the either big bets or things that you're like really stoked about? That you guys are investing in? Don't need to give away any secret sauce.   [0:10:18] Marie Feliho: Yeah.   [0:10:19] PJ Bruno: [crosstalk] You're like "uh".   [0:10:21] Marie Feliho: We're on a quest of being more relevant, more conversational with our customers. So anything that sort of helps with bringing the ingredients together to create this amazing sort of meal for, of personalization-   [0:10:37] Taylor Gibb: Very apt metaphor for Just Eat.   [0:10:38] PJ Bruno: Hey, don't get comfortable basically. Right?   [0:10:38] Marie Feliho: Yeah, exactly. But we're super excited about things like content card, we've got some grand plans with that. We already started our journey towards using it and yeah, it's going to be super, super exciting. Watch that space.   [0:10:54] PJ Bruno: Great. Watch that space. I love it, Marie, thanks so much for being here.   [0:10:58] Marie Feliho: Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.   [0:11:00] Taylor Gibb: Glad to have you here.   [0:11:00] Marie Feliho: Thank you.   [0:11:00] PJ Bruno: Taylor, thanks for joining me.   [0:11:01] Taylor Gibb: It was so much fun meeting you, talking with you, and now I'm hungry.   [0:11:04] Marie Feliho: Well, unfortunately we don't have Just Eat here. You're going to have to come to London.   [0:11:09] Taylor Gibb: I think I could do that.   [0:11:10] Marie Feliho: Yeah?   [0:11:10] PJ Bruno: [crosstalk]   [0:11:10] Taylor Gibb: I mean if you say so. That's it.   [0:11:13] PJ Bruno: That's a work trip. We can expense that.   [0:11:15] Taylor Gibb: That's a work trip. Thank you very much.   [0:11:15] PJ Bruno: Thanks everyone at home listening or wherever you are. You heard it here. Disrupt or be disrupted. Take care. [0:11:22]

Founder of Phiture Andy Carvell joins us to muse on his early career in mobile gaming development, his pivot toward marketing tech, and what it takes to consult on tech stacks, app store optimization and growth-minded strategy. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your Martech industry discuss digest, and we're back again with another episode from our humanity series. Today we got with us one of our very good friends, close partner, Andy Carvell, partner and co-founder at Phiture. Andy, thanks for being here.   [0:00:34] Andy Carvell: Thanks for having me.   [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: Absolutely man. And also to my right. Dave, the golden boy, Goldstein, head of Global Solutions Alliances. Dave, this has been a long time coming,   [0:00:44] Dave Goldstein: Long-time coming, so happy to be here.   [0:00:47] PJ Bruno: Andy, for those people out there who don't know what Phiture is, why don't you just give us a little summation there.   [0:00:52] Andy Carvell: Yeah, sure. We're a mobile growth consultancy based out of Berlin. We're a team of 30 mobile growth experts, and we help companies with mobile apps to get a grip on some of their mobile growth challenges. Quite specifically, that would be things like app store optimization and data-driven experimentation. With CRM.   [0:01:10] PJ Bruno: It sounds like the need there is probably just growing bigger and bigger every year. Right?   [0:01:14] Andy Carvell: There's plenty of demand. Yeah, it's pretty healthy.   [0:01:16] Dave Goldstein: I'm actually just curious Andy, cause obviously it's incredible what you've done building out Mobilegrowthstack.com you're clearly like an incredible industry leader and the thought leadership that you guys put out is unparalleled, and it's free for everybody. Even your competition can go and read all that content, which is just unbelievable that you actually put all that-   [0:01:37] PJ Bruno: That's confidence right there.   [0:01:37] Dave Goldstein: That is confidence. That's exactly what that is, and it's fantastic. But, can you tell us a little bit about your journey? Your background, how did you get to start this consultancy and develop all of this thought leadership? Where'd you start, and how'd you get to kind of where you are today?   [0:01:51] Andy Carvell: Yeah, sure. And thanks for the kind words, Dave. When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was make games. My father brought a home computer for me and my brother when we were pretty young. I was like five years old or something. And he taught us how to program it. My father was like one of the first generation of computer programmers, so I was kind of fortunate enough that I got taught how to code, long time ago, and all I wanted to do was make games. Just was really into computers, really into games. Went to university, did a bachelor's degree in computer science, and after I graduated, I just fully expected to go into the console games industry and make PlayStation games, and I've done a PlayStation game for my final year project. It was straight forward career path as far as I was concerned, but actually ended up working for Nokia who were hiring for games programmers to make games on mobile phones, which were kind of a new thing at that point. I didn't have a mobile phone when I joined Nokia.   [0:02:39] Dave Goldstein: Wow. Do you remember what year that was?   [0:02:41] Andy Carvell: Oh, that was 1999.   [0:02:42] Dave Goldstein: Oh wow. Okay. I probably had the StarTAC, the Motorola StarTAC flip phone at that point.   [0:02:48] PJ Bruno: The project, the PS game that you created, what was it? What was the concept of that?   [0:02:54] Andy Carvell: I made a puzzle game. So it was something... There was a TV show in the UK called Blockbusters, which kind of gave me the idea of... You have to basically create a path like a cross, not exactly a chessboard, but something similar. And the idea was... With this puzzle game, you kind of had this character, and you would run around a board flipping over tiles, and they would flip over in different colors. You had to build a path of the same color from one end to the other.   [0:03:21] PJ Bruno: Very cool.   [0:03:21] Andy Carvell: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I joined Nokia back in 1999, making embedded games. I made a game called Space Impact, which is one of the first like side-scrolling shoot'em up arcade games for a mobile phone. And I just really fell in love with mobile and the technology, the disruptivity of it. And also actually for making games on really resource constrained devices. It was an interesting optimization challenge, and I stayed in mobile games for about 10 years, eventually kind of decided to go do something new, so I went to business school, got my MBA and there is where I kind of specialized in marketing and marketing strategy and it was kind of after that when I came to Berlin and joined SoundCloud, I was kind of able to marry those kind of two disciplines of sort of technical background and all the sort of new marketing stuff I'd learned and apply that at SoundCloud, helping them to kind of transition from being a web-first company to a mobile-first company and that's kind of where these two things kind of came together.   [0:04:21] PJ Bruno: Is that when you moved to Berlin, or you were already there?   [0:04:24] Andy Carvell: Yeah, actually, I moved to Berlin to do a 10-week project to finish my MBA. I had to write a dissertation based on some research that I'd done in industry, and I did that with an ad tech company called the SponsorPay now called Fyber. So I wrote my dissertation at Fyber but decided, actually, I wasn't super keen on staying in ad tech, so I looked around what else was happening in Berlin and yeah, SoundCloud were hiring for somebody with a... With mobile experience. So it was kind of like perfect fit really.   [0:04:51] Dave Goldstein: It's amazing. And when I think about some of the savviest digital marketers out there, what comes to mind is folks in gaming. I mean, it's unbelievable how tight they are around marketing processes and conversions, right? It seems like that industry was the first to lock it down, and it's like if you knew that industry you, would do well anywhere, right? You could take that to Legacy Enterprise and blow people's minds.   [0:05:19] Andy Carvell: The games folks are always kind of ahead of the game I'd say like a couple of years ahead. In terms of a lot of the best practice, you see usually happening first in games. Yeah.   [0:05:28] PJ Bruno: Do you miss gaming?   [0:05:29] Andy Carvell: I don't miss it as much as I thought I would when I kind of like made the switch. Actually, I really thought that I was going to go back into gaming industry after business school, but just didn't... It didn't turn out that way.   [0:05:39] PJ Bruno: That's life, isn't it?   [0:05:40] Dave Goldstein: Truly. And so as you kind of made this transition from your SoundCloud days to starting this consultancy, I imagine folks are trying to kind of capitalize on this incredible knowledge base that you've developed over the years. What are some of the challenges that, common, maybe uncommon these days, as it relates to enterprises that are in businesses of all types that are trying to figure out how to do growth cause you clearly understand it intimately?   [0:06:10] Andy Carvell: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of challenges. It's hard to generalize, I think, to a huge extent. But we definitely see a few kind of common themes with the kind of companies that are coming to Phiture and asking for our help. We see a lot of companies just sort of struggling to navigate the vendor space and the tool space and just sort of understand what is the right kind of tech stack that's going to work for them and what exactly will that enable for them and what are their options there. We see that a lot, and we also see companies, particularly on the app store optimization side, just companies either don't realize quite how complex an operation they need to really operationalize ASO at scale across like multiple geographies. And we can sort of help them first of all to understand that and help them to either build out that process in-house or we give them an outsource solution for it.   [0:06:57] PJ Bruno: So Phiture can do things like what you're just talking about at a very macro level, but you guys also can do the very tactical HTML design as well when it comes to in-app and other things. Is that right?   [0:07:10] Andy Carvell: Yeah, that's right. We've built out actually a bunch of cool stuff on top of the Braze platform. For example, you have the in-app template technology that we've built. Yeah, we're doing some pretty cool stuff there. I think it's really important for me personally that our company is not just telling people like, "Oh, you can do this or you know, this, this, this would be a good way to do, you know, do something and," and building out a strategy with them. We definitely do the strategic work, but I think it's really important to me that we stay really current, and we stay at the cutting edge of what we're doing, and we really want to be like leading the way with the implementation side of things as well. I think it's important that... Otherwise, we get stale.   [0:07:44] PJ Bruno: Right. And it's all conjecture until you actually put something together and have something to show. Right?   [0:07:49] Andy Carvell: Yeah. Right. And be able to drive measurable impact with it. We're all about measuring things and real impact.   [0:07:55] Dave Goldstein: It's incredible the level of sophistication and complexity, right? When you think about... To your point, right? People are trying to choose the right technology to do the job. That in itself, I mean, seems like a full-time job. Just to evaluate all the technologies out there and align it with what it is that you're trying to do as a business. On top of that, you've got organizational structure challenges, right? Where people are just... They're not organized. You could give them the best toolset in the world. You could put in the best plumbing, and they're just not organized to use it effectively. Right?   [0:08:27] Andy Carvell: I'd say that's a really big one actually. In fact, that's probably the most common thing that we're helping companies with. It's not really the tool setup. It's more about building good processes around whatever tool stack they're using. We can work with companies with very varied tool stacks. But typically their biggest challenge is operationalizing the actual kind of growth process, and that's really comes down to having a really strong experimental process kind of rigid instrumentation and sort of dedication to actually measuring impact properly and then getting into a good strong experimental cadence. And that's the kind of stuff that actually is our bread and butter that we help companies with.   [0:09:08] Dave Goldstein: We're always talking about nailing the fundamentals and ensuring that... I mean, you've got to get those down first, right? Because so many people get caught up in the hype of new technologies. Speaking of which, there is a lot of kind of quote cool technology out there, voice AI, bots. I'm trying to think of all the different things that I've seen and heard as of late. Right? And there have been some, what I consider to be pretty interesting implementations of them. Is there anything in particular that you're really excited about to see the evolution of and can actually envision how it might fit into the future of growth for some of the organizations that you help?   [0:09:47] Andy Carvell: So, I mean, I think the technologies that I'm super excited about... I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd, so I tend to look a little bit further ahead. I'm excited for quantum computing kind of brain-computer interfaces. This kind of stuff, which will for sure have implications for growth, but it's probably a little further out. So if I would kind of bring it back a few years, I think I'm kind of interested to see how mobile evolves as... I think the screen will kind of eventually disappear and we'll just get like retina projection and things like that. I think that the device will kind of evaporate, but the mobile computing capability will definitely stay with us. I think wearable devices, conversational interfaces, I think we're seeing the kind of early stage of that with devices like Alexa and Google Home and Chatbots and things like that. But I think conversational interfaces will... You'll have a way to go as well. And that, of course, then merges with AI and yeah, a bunch of fun stuff.   [0:10:42] PJ Bruno: Retinal interference.   [0:10:45] Dave Goldstein: It's not long until we're living in the world of Minority Report.   [0:10:49] PJ Bruno: Have you seen these tech tattoos yet? Have you seen these?   [0:10:52] Andy Carvell: I haven't seen the tech tattoos.   [0:10:53] PJ Bruno: It's basically an ink that is a conductor with some sort of circuit in there, and basically, I guess the thinking is, in the future, instead of getting your regular physical checkup, this is some sort of circuit that actually can check your vitals regularly and keep you kind of not just doing it annually, but day to day, kind of know where you're at with physical health.   [0:11:17] Dave Goldstein: Wow. Where do I sign up?   [0:11:19] Andy Carvell: I think personalization in the healthcare sphere is also super interesting. Especially when you get into gene editing and-   [0:11:24] PJ Bruno: Oh, man. Yeah. I mean not just wearables, but I mean, where does it end, right? I mean robotics in general, adding to your body. When does it, when is it no longer you?   [0:11:34] Dave Goldstein: Well, technically, it is no longer you, right? We are bionic. We carry around this supercomputer in our pocket, and many people have it attached to their wrist. Right? In essence, we've got the knowledge of all mankind right here with us.   [0:11:48] PJ Bruno: I'm a little bit of a sci-fi nerd as well, and I had the conversation with my roommate about where does humanity end if like Oh like years from now, great, you got a bionic arm, you had an accident. Like you know what? I want to add some stuff as well, and I just kept pushing the limit. I was like, all right, if everything's a robot, but your head is human, are you still human? So yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm still me, and I just kind of kept pushing it like, all right, your consciousness is downloaded into a hard drive. It's replicated. Is that still you? No. I don't think that's me anymore. I love pondering those things.   [0:12:18] Dave Goldstein: I've long thought we're just the caterpillar waiting for our robot overlords to blossom into the beautiful butterflies-   [0:12:25] PJ Bruno: Does that scare you at all? AI at all?   [0:12:28] Andy Carvell: Yeah, it does actually. One of my favorite books is Neuromancer by William Gibson, which is really all about a rogue AI, which is trying to kind of augment itself and join with it's other... It has like...But there are basically two AIs based in different places in the world, and they're trying to kind of connect a network together because then they'll basically become this like super-entity-   [0:12:50] PJ Bruno: Disguised, as an ecosystem, takes over the world.   [0:12:53] Andy Carvell: Yeah, I mean, it's a great story. It's a great book, but it's... I think we've seen many times over the last like kind of 10, 20 years that technology takes on interesting... Has interesting effects on the world, which are not entirely predictable. I don't think anyone would have necessarily predicted Cambridge Analytica or the Facebook stuff. And the ways that social media is being kind of subverted. And I think things like AI will be no different. And it's also already being heavily kind of weaponized and invested in, as the new frontier in warfare. So yeah, I think it's going to be pretty scary. But also there'll be some really cool applications for it. So...   [0:13:34] PJ Bruno: Yes. Well, I also... I got to get around to promoting your podcast, Andy, as a fellow podcaster. It's very clear that you have a passion for what you do. And I fully believe that those who have a strong passion for their careers are the ones that are going to succeed the most. And so from all the great stuff that you guys are doing outcomes, Mobile Growth Nightmares and I just love to hear about what brought that about. And I mean, clearly, it's something that you care about, and Dave mentioned you guys give away a lot of your content for free. That feels like a cause that feels like a mission. That's something that can actually kind of stand the test of time. So I'd love to hear about it.   [0:14:13] Andy Carvell: Sure. Yeah. So Mobile Growth Nightmares... We'll also to say for the record; it's not a feature production. I do it with Jessica from Blinkist, which was also kind of very deliberate that... We didn't want to just do another corporate kind of podcast-   [0:14:29] PJ Bruno: Not selling something here.   [0:14:30] Andy Carvell: Exactly. It was just kind of a bit of fun. We're both kind of working in the industry. We have a pretty good network of people that we can kind of just invite on the show. We record it when we have time, which is why there's not many episodes out. It'd be like... It's kind of like best efforts kind of thing. So it's all kind of quite informal, quite casual and it's kind of a fun project, but it's a great way to connect with people in the industry and just have a chat like we're doing now. And yeah, the kind of general concept is that we talk about growth fuck-ups basically like times when people have done something which they've learned from. Which that they've made some kind of mistake and yeah. What they've learned from it, which we find is just a fun angle to take.   [0:15:13] Dave Goldstein: Do you have a favorite nightmare that you've heard or perhaps even experienced yourself? Like something in particular like, "Oh man, I clicked send to 10 million people," an oops campaign. Anything to that effect that you would share?   [0:15:28] Andy Carvell: So we actually... We had a guy called George from [Glovo 00:15:31]. We did an onstage kind of a variant of the Mobile Growth Nightmare show. It wasn't actually with me and Jessica, but we did it at our ASL conference in New York lately. And yeah, I mean basically his... I won't give too much away because it's a really fun story and I guess we might get him on the podcast at some point, but it ended up with, I think the police being involved and yeah, his boss... Emails from the boss at nine o'clock in the morning. So yeah, I think those kinds of nightmares are the best ones where he... As he pointed out after, it's like, look; this is a real nightmare. This is not the not, not an [AP] test that's gone wrong.   [0:16:10] PJ Bruno: This is a real nightmare. This is not just a growth nightmare.   [0:16:15] Andy Carvell: I think when law enforcement got involved. That's a good mobile growth nightmare.   [0:16:18] PJ Bruno: Jeez loueez. Can't imagine.   [0:16:19] Dave Goldstein: Unbelievable. So I suppose one of the questions I had, right? Is as folks who are looking to level up their growth game. They look to experts like you. If you can give away one actionable tidbit, one massive takeaway that someone who would be listening to this would be able to take back and ponder over and apply to perhaps level up their growth engine and their growth strategy. Anything, in particular, come to mind?   [0:16:49] Andy Carvell: So yeah, I'm not a big fan in general of sort of growth hacks or sort of specific tactics that you could apply it across the board. Because I think you want to look at sort of things specifically in terms of your situation. However, I'm going to now contradict myself and say one thing which I would pretty much always recommend, which we also don't see very often, even in pretty sophisticated setups. Often this is missing. And it'll really help any growth marketer. And that's to have a global holdout group. It's actually pretty simple, but keep a group of users back and have that holdout group kind of refreshing with new users as you get new cohorts in and basically just keep back, whether it's 1% or 5%, whatever you need to get a significant... Statistically significant result in a meaningful amount of time and have those not exposed to whatever growth experiments you're doing. And [I see this work 00:00:17:42] particularly for CRM and for folks using Braze this is really valid, but if you're doing growth work and you don't this global holdout that's just not exposed to any of the experiments that you're running, you won't be able to prove the ROI and the overall impact of your initiatives. So you'd think as any growth marketer or growth professional in the industry, I'd really recommend you do this because it's really going to help you when you're going for promotion next year to be able to actually demonstrate the value that you've actually delivered for the business and the only way you can really do that, particularly with something like CRM, where you have loads of different campaigns going on with the different touchpoints, is to look at the aggregate impact by having a holdout group.   [0:18:21] PJ Bruno: And I guess the whole point of that is complete randomness. Just take a bunch or-   [0:18:26] Andy Carvell: Yeah, absolutely. It should be just a random sample. Yep.   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: There you go. Holdout groups, control groups, do it.   [0:18:31] Dave Goldstein: As always, an open book sharing of information. It's just incredible. Thank you so much for all you do for our industry.   [0:18:38] Andy Carvell: Thanks for having me on the podcast, and thanks for your kind words.   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Thanks, Andy, and thanks Dave, for joining us and thank you all at home. Take care. [0:18:46]

CRM Sr. Product Manager at OKCupid, Ana Albornoz, talks about the power of connection and how OKC lets that sentiment permeate their messaging, events, and even the way their messaging systems are set up. PS. They're hiring engineers! *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hi again and welcome back to Braze For Impact, your martech industry discuss digest. We're back again with another episode from our Humanities Series. So thrilled to have with us today as our guest, Ana Albornoz, the CRM, Senior Product Manager at OkCupid. Ana, thank you so much for being here.   [0:00:38] Ana Albornoz: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be part of the series.   [0:00:41] PJ Bruno: We are very excited to have you, and also I'm excited to have my partner in crime here from our success org. Taylor Gibb, how are you doing?   [0:00:49] Taylor Gibb: I am doing great, I have to say. I am excited, especially today because Ana and I used to work together. I was the CSM for OkCupid for a bit back in the day.   [0:00:58] PJ Bruno: What?   [0:00:58] Taylor Gibb: So this is like blast from the past, get to check in on all the great things you've been doing. So, selfishly, I'm very excited as well.   [0:01:06] PJ Bruno: Well, I can't believe it. We're here to witness this rekindling of friendship.   [0:01:09] Taylor Gibb: It's a reunion.   [0:01:09] Ana Albornoz: Exactly.   [0:01:10] PJ Bruno: So why don't you just tell us a little bit about, you know, first OkCupid and your role there? Like you know, your journey so far with OkCupid. I'd love to hear about it.   [0:01:18] Ana Albornoz: Well at OkCupid, I'm the head of CRM, and I joined two years ago. It's been very, very interesting to be part of this change because we were migrating a little bit from a old Legacy system into Braze and engaging more and more users in learning about what they want, what they need. And so it's been very, very exciting.   [0:01:44] PJ Bruno: So when you joined two years ago, was that migration like the biggest challenge? When you came in the door, your boss said to you this is our number one priority? Or what was it like when you came in?   [0:01:55] Ana Albornoz: Well, actually it was supposed to be ready to go, which of course it wasn't. But it's been very interesting. By the time I joined, we were already a 13 year organization and as such we had some Legacy and old data and old practices. So I think the biggest challenge has been making it so it is customizable as in get more engageable for users. And it's been a an interesting journey and now we are much more sophisticated and target better. We can react much faster. But this is an ongoing process because we always want to be timely and relevant for our users   [0:02:38] PJ Bruno: and I mean, just the dating scene in general, mobile dating in general ... It's just exploded over the past five years. It's become massive.   [0:02:45] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely, and you always do a great job of making things really multichannel, if I remember correctly. You've got a great routine of push notifications going out, but you also sent out some newsletters, if I recall, that had things like your top matches for the week. How have things changed in terms of you guys going from using primarily one channel to weaving in a whole bunch of different channels and different personalization?   [0:03:09] Ana Albornoz: Well this is ... As I said, it's an ongoing process. We were learning all the time of what is more engaging for users depending on the journal. We are here to make connections. Our mission is really to help people build meaningful connections. And as such, we need to understand what is ... What is relevant for them and when, and we do a very good job of that at OkCupid. We know that users have multiple alternatives, but OkCupid is the only one that give them an option to connect on what really matters and what matters to them at a particular time. So we accommodate all those ... Those insights into our communication and try to be mindful of what is relevant and what is more important for users at a specific time.   [0:04:05] Taylor Gibb: And if I recall correctly, you also have celebrations oftentimes at your office of people who have met through OkCupid. You even said that there was a wedding proposal at one point.   [0:04:14] Ana Albornoz: Yes.   [0:04:15] Taylor Gibb: I love that. And I do know, as well, that a lot of people at Braze have met through OkCupid their husbands and wives.   [0:04:21] PJ Bruno: That's true. Jordan did, right?   [0:04:22] Taylor Gibb: Jordan did. Yeah.   [0:04:24] PJ Bruno: Jordan Houghton Mace.   [0:04:24] Ana Albornoz: I'm so happy to hear that, actually. Yeah, we know that 30% of couples nowadays met at a dating app. We know that that's the place, especially now people look for other alternatives. You know, outside of the traditional school, work, church groups. And so we are there for the users to be able to connect on what matters to them. So we constantly are updating our questions and actually use a lot of Braze into that. Making sure people go and answer those relevant and current questions.   [0:05:02] PJ Bruno: And you mentioned 30% of people are meeting on dating apps now. And there's so many, you could list off a bunch right now. And so how do you guys use that competition to like differentiate yourself? It's like obviously you want to stand out amidst the crowd cause there's so many options. Like how do you say ... And I love what you said about your mission to be connecting people. I feel like it probably all comes back to that, but I'd love to hear more.   [0:05:24] Ana Albornoz: One of the main things is we value the ability to talk to our users. It's not about what we want to say is about what they need to hear or learn. Like letting them know that somebody matched with them in a timely fashion. Letting them know that they are getting, you know, that they ... It's a good timing for them to update their picture. Telling them about the question. I think actually questions is one of the best examples for that because we are all at all times trying to be current, not only for ... Not in general, but localized as well. And so we do send notifications to let people know that they should come and answer those questions. And with those questions, then we are able to match them and also to give them good topics of conversation. So, it's not only about matching them with people that there are ... That are aligned, but also that they have a first good date when they have topics in common and ideas to talk to about. So [inaudible] that's one of our main differentiators.   [0:06:33] Taylor Gibb: I also am a little bit curious. I know that some dating apps have trouble knowing what to do after someone finds somebody. You know, like the goal is always to create a relationship. How do you guys deal with the fact that, you know, ultimately people will be either deleting your app or perhaps just using it differently?   [0:06:51] Ana Albornoz: That's an excellent question. I think when we say that our mission is to create connections that matter, not all of them are going to end up in marriage. So the fact that they come back eventually is also a good story. So we're very mindful of them ... Like if they in a relationship or they delete our app, and we understand they might be in ... Trying at least to build the relationship. But many people also come to us with a good stories, not ... A success story is not only weddings or anniversaries, which we get a lot and are very, very excited and moving. But also when they come back and say, you know, I met this great person, it didn't work, but it was fine. It was meaningful. It was healthy.   [0:07:35] Taylor Gibb: Right.   [0:07:36] PJ Bruno: And also, you know, we're talking about connections, right? We're talking about communication. You guys facilitating that. They say the best tech stack is one that feels invisible. You're not thinking about the mechanism that sent you this message. You're just like, oh, this just feels natural. You know, in light of that, let's get in the weeds a bit about your tech stack. Like what's some cool tech that you guys have launched that you got to be a part of in the past year?   [0:08:01] Ana Albornoz: So I have to say that integrating Brace Currents to or with our Looker data has been very, very useful. It's been challenging because we have massive amounts of data. As you can imagine. You know, we're not known for an algorithm for nothing. We do manage a lot, a lot of data and use it as wisely as possible. But, but you know, integrating was difficult. But now that we integrated, it gives us so much light into what works, what doesn't, what affects beyond just, you know, open and clicks but actually move people to do certain things. If you're telling them about a message, you can see whether they actually replied to a message. If you tell them about a match, you can see what happened afterwards and so on. So integrating to have more visibility about what is happening has been really useful. And you know, we are an infant in that area because we complete integration not that long ago, but so far it's very, very good.   [0:09:13] PJ Bruno: Of course, being able to get that data out and do stuff with it.   [0:09:16] Taylor Gibb: Yep, and one thing I remember from working with your team is that you're some of the most thoughtful and detail oriented in terms of just parsing through the data and using it for really interesting and purposes that move the needle. I think that thoughtful approach is what sets you apart. And it does make you feel like a more human dating app, which is of course what we're talking about here in the Humanities Series. So, obviously it was a shoe in to have you here today, but I think that it's worth pointing out that that's something that you've always excelled at.   [0:09:43] Ana Albornoz: Yeah, I mean for us being able to ... To be perceived and being aware that people on the other side, the recipients of this messages are our people. Actually we built our whole mission, our whole work around never forgetting that it's humans trying to fulfill a basic need which we all have ... Which is craving connection. And that's what we are here for.   [0:10:15] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:10:16] PJ Bruno: That's beautiful. Wrapping up here, what is something that you're really excited about looking to the future for OkCupid? An initiative? A piece of tech? A new process or team? Some collaboration? Anything. What are you most pumped about?   [0:10:34] Ana Albornoz: This quarter, we launched our very first international marketing campaign in India, and it's been a huge success. So we are looking for 2020 to more markets that are relevant to the dating app scene. So we are very exciting to go there, knowing that it's different. Understanding that we need to learn better what makes sense for those markets different from here. Customizations is key. Not only about content, questions, their holidays, and also which channels make sense for them. Knowing that for other countries probably email is not as relevant, for instance, but push is. And maybe their schedules are different from us, it's not the same day off. Things like that, which are small but meaningful when you go outside. And actually the whole thing of expansion is a big effort, not only CRM team, but the whole team has been working very hard. So we're growing, we're growing very, very rapidly. And we are looking for exciting people. For people that are sharing our vision, that are learners, that are excited about the user, that are looking to make a difference in people's lives. Every day I come to work, I start working ... I am excited about reading those messages about weddings and anniversaries, and kids. And people sometimes messaged us three years later like, "You know, three years ago I met so-and-so," and hat's that's very very moving and exciting. And as far as our mission goes, this one is very hard to top up.   [0:12:29] PJ Bruno: Fantastic. And so if you're listening out there, it sounds like OkCupid is hiring and so-   [0:12:35] Ana Albornoz: We are, we are. Visit us at OkCupid.com/careers and see all the openings that we have and apply.If you feel that this is a mission that is speaking to you, and that you are a learner, and you are driven by developing your own skills and giving yourself into our great mission, just come to us.   [0:12:59] PJ Bruno: Please join the love revolution. Ana, thank you so much for being here.   [0:13:03] Ana Albornoz: Thank you for having me.   [0:13:04] Taylor Gibb: Good to see you again.   [0:13:05] Ana Albornoz: Same here.   [0:13:05] PJ Bruno: Taylor Gibb at my side, always much appreciated.   [0:13:09] Taylor Gibb: Anytime.   [0:13:10] PJ Bruno: And you guys, thanks for stopping by and joining us. Take care. [0:13:13]        

CEO of Notable Growth, Rebecca Nackson, talks being the "marketing therapist" in the martech space. She brings us the 3 T's: Team, Tools and Tactics. You need to have all in place to create a best-in-class engagement solution. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       [0:00:17] P.J. Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your MarTech Industry discuss digest. I'm your host, P.J. Bruno. And with us today, CEO of Notable Growth and very good friend of ours, Rebecca Nackson. How are you, Rebecca?   [0:00:31] Rebecca Nackson: I am doing just fine.   [0:00:32] P.J. Bruno: Welcome.   [0:00:33] Rebecca Nackson: Thanks for having me.   [0:00:33] P.J. Bruno: Welcome, Rebecca. And also my confidant here, my friend and coworker, head of Global Solutions Alliances at Braze, Dave Goldstein. What's up buddy?   [0:00:44] Dave Goldstein: How are you guys?   [0:00:46] P.J. Bruno: We're doing great, aren't we? We're cozy.   [0:00:48] Rebecca Nackson: It's just a shame that people can't see the shoes Dave is wearing.   [0:00:52] P.J. Bruno: I wish you could. Imagine bedazzled. Right?   [0:00:57] Dave Goldstein: Consequently, these are the shoes... Funny, we'll tie this back to marketing.   [0:01:00] Rebecca Nackson: Okay.   [0:01:00] Dave Goldstein: You ready?   [0:01:01] Rebecca Nackson: Yes.   [0:01:01] Dave Goldstein: These were the shoes that... I'm trying to remember which vendor I bought them from, but it was online. And they had a mobile app. And I went back and forth between the two. And I was browsing and I was favoriting some things in the mobile app. And I went back to the website and they were chasing me with ads. Right? Like showing me these shoes, and I was like, God, I love these shoes. I really got to buy them. I really got to buy them. And I converted. I bought them. And I'm wearing them here. I still think I get ads for these shoes. They're still popping up in the sidebars. It's unbelievable.   [0:01:32] Rebecca Nackson: This went from being a triumph of great targeting to the perils.   [0:01:35] P.J. Bruno: Yeah.   [0:01:36] Dave Goldstein: I'm like-   [0:01:36] P.J. Bruno: Broken.   [0:01:37] Rebecca Nackson: Right? Broken experience.   [0:01:38] Dave Goldstein: How much more money are you going to waste?   [0:01:40] Rebecca Nackson: How many more pairs of this same shoe?   [0:01:42] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. I love them. I bought them. Shout out to the Nike Air Jordans, by the way.   [0:01:46] P.J. Bruno: He's wearing them. You guys can't see these things but they're glittered and there's a five inch heel.   [0:01:52] Dave Goldstein: What am I, Kiss?   [0:01:53] P.J. Bruno: Anyway, here we are hanging out. Rebecca Nackson, very good friend. We worked with her for a while now. Good friend of Braze. Was at Prolific originally. And we actually were just talking about, six months ago we were at MAU. And now here she is CEO of Notable Growth already starting super strong. Tell us about what happened in the last six months maybe. Let's wrap all up into ten minutes.   [0:02:18] Rebecca Nackson: I saw a lot of great content and I just thought, I'm ready to do it myself.   [0:02:22] P.J. Bruno: Let's go.   [0:02:24] Rebecca Nackson: A combination of events outside and inside of my control. But a story I like to tell is, I signed up to go to an event a couple of years ago so that I could learn a lot more. I was feeling a little intimidated that other people in the space knew more about this than I did. So, I signed up to go to this event. And they then reach out to me to ask if I'll be on one of the panels. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Here I am thinking like I wanted to... I can't tell if this just shows how little everybody else knows. But I think that every time I come to an event like this, it is a combination of those things where I'm always learning. It's one of the things that I love about being in this space. Like there's not a single not even just conference that I come to, even blog post that I read that I don't think, oh, that's something new. But then, there's also some cool reminders where I think, oh, maybe I do know a thing or two by now.   [0:03:18] P.J. Bruno: Exactly. I mean, I love that approach though, always learning, right?   [0:03:21] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:03:21] P.J. Bruno: Because nobody knows all of it. And everybody feels that imposter syndrome.   [0:03:25] Rebecca Nackson: Yes.   [0:03:25] P.J. Bruno: And it's honestly refreshing to have a CEO that can like own that, so.   [0:03:29] Rebecca Nackson: Thank you.   [0:03:29] Dave Goldstein: Isn't it amazing too, right? Like just the general community that's popped up in the last two, three years?   [0:03:36] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:03:36] Dave Goldstein: It seems like there's so many people popping up who have done tremendous things and everybody is like forthcoming with information and sharing.   [0:03:45] Rebecca Nackson: Yes.   [0:03:45] Dave Goldstein: The community is incredible.   [0:03:46] Rebecca Nackson: I do have to say, it's not just because I'm in this small booth with the two of you, that there is something extra special about the Braze community and the vibe here at LTR of really cool brands sharing those. Like I think everybody is a little bit geeking out with one another. I tell clients of ours that, when you're signing your contract, you're not just signing on for this tool. You're part of a community. And I'm really seeing that here. And maybe it is a little self fulfilling because, if you've taken the time out of your schedule to come to an event, you're probably more likely to be both learning and sharing. But I'm seeing that people from various brands don't do the same thing at all, but are really connecting about how they're using Braze and just how they're trying to solve these problems in general.   [0:04:36] Dave Goldstein: It's amazing. It makes me think, actually, the conversation that I had with Steven yesterday, Steven Moy in particular, shout out to Steven Moy. He said, people don't buy brands, they join brands.   [0:04:51] Rebecca Nackson: Oh, I love that.   [0:04:51] Dave Goldstein: And I love that. Right?   [0:04:53] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:04:53] Dave Goldstein: I think that's not always the case. The truth is like the brands that are killing it, their customers are the ones that are joining the brand.   [0:05:02] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah, that's right. That's right.   [0:05:03] Dave Goldstein: And I love what you said, right?   [0:05:04] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:05:05] Dave Goldstein: Like I think that's spot on. It's like, you want to be part of a community of people that are doing incredible things.   [0:05:11] Rebecca Nackson: Yep. So, one of the reasons that I started consulting on this is because, as you guys know, I'm a two time Braze client myself. And it was very much the experience that I went through of choosing, integrating, launching, maximizing my own use of the tool that I thought, okay, I needed help when I was doing that. And part of the stress or the questions come from you're talking to competing sales people and you feel like I don't know who to choose. And so, one thing that I tell people now is, look at the brands that are using. Like that's proof. Right? And I have just always been struck by the caliber of the clients. And I think that that says a lot. Like it's clear that they're investing a lot in their marketing technology. And, if they've been there for a number of years, that certainly sends a good signal.   [0:06:04] P.J. Bruno: Yep.   [0:06:05] Rebecca Nackson: And the second time that I ultimately selected Braze when I was going through that process, I remember coming to an event. And I was there in large part because I just was a big fan of the brands that were in the invitation. And to just be there and get to talk to them, for those people that know me, they already know how geeky I am. And, for those that are listening, they'll learn. But those are like celebrities to me.   [0:06:29] P.J. Bruno: Right.   [0:06:30] Rebecca Nackson: You walk around. You see the billboards. You see the commercials.   [0:06:33] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:06:33] Rebecca Nackson: You don't know that there's human beings.   [0:06:34] Dave Goldstein: They're in the subway cars, full takeover.   [0:06:36] Rebecca Nackson: Yep. Yep.   [0:06:37] P.J. Bruno: And, as your fan girling, they walk up and they're like, hey, do you want to run a panel actually? And you're like, what?   [0:06:43] Rebecca Nackson: I'm looking behind me. They must be talking to somebody from Casper right now. They can't possibly want me.   [0:06:47] P.J. Bruno: Exactly.   [0:06:48] Dave Goldstein: Are there any brands in particular that are absolutely nailing it, in your opinion, who you're really like fan girling out about where you're like, wow, that marketing got me.   [0:06:58] Rebecca Nackson: Oh, God. Yeah. We joke that, actually when you talk about the subway, we joke that our own growth hacking is by reaching out to everybody that's either advertising on podcasts or advertising in the subway. But what I'm really enjoying is I like a good underdog. I like a comeback story. So, I love seeing what's happening with retail and like the direct to consumer brands, but tying it into their in store experiences, the quote unquote digital transformation that's going on, but how those in-person experiences come together. And P.J., something that we've talked about is, every time there's a transition happening, let's say like the end of retail, right, everybody wants to act like it's the first time-   [0:07:45] Dave Goldstein: The apocalypse.   [0:07:47] Rebecca Nackson: The apocalypse is coming. But this has been happening since the beginning of advertising. So, it's really cool to see the brands that embrace it and think about it as this great challenge or maybe even get out ahead of it. I love that moment. Your back is against the wall for a minute, and then you lean in. And it's just a pleasure to watch it.   [0:08:06] P.J. Bruno: And that's what Notable is doing. You guys are the team that helps them lean in, as opposed to like push themselves away.   [0:08:13] Rebecca Nackson: In consulting, what I've learned, there's these two scenarios of either, there's the lean in like we want to get ahead of it. We know what we know. We know what we don't know. And it's interesting to us, focus is such an important aspect to what we do. And so, it's a pleasure to partner with somebody else who is really focused on their core business. And it's a great partner to us. Like it's actually much more interesting to work with somebody who's leaning in and has an opinion. So, we don't want them to just relegate that to us.   [0:08:41] P.J. Bruno: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:08:42] Dave Goldstein: Do it all. Come up with everything for us.   [0:08:43] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:08:43] P.J. Bruno: Right.   [0:08:44] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah. Because then they can't appreciate how great what we just did was.   [0:08:47] P.J. Bruno: Right. The benefits of a partner to a service.   [0:08:50] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:08:51] P.J. Bruno: It's just such a different thing.   [0:08:52] Rebecca Nackson: Absolutely. And then, the other scenario is somebody who sort of fought it until the last possible minute. And now, they're in this moment where-   [0:09:05] P.J. Bruno: In the hole a little bit.   [0:09:06] Rebecca Nackson: They're in the hole a little bit. And so, that's an equally challenging and an exciting opportunity. And we try as much as we can to say, it's always the least expensive and the most successful to try to do it early on. But it's not always from the brands that you would expect it to be either, which is a big lesson that I've learned. And what's really fun is... And I sort of mentioned that in terms of the brands here, I think what's really interesting is when you can talk about a scenario, an example I've used before is we've worked with streaming partners before. We're working now with somebody in the fast food space. And, if you can think of an example that worked really well in streaming, and you can apply it to the QSR, the quick serve restaurant, what's great about that is like let's not do something that's the fifth streaming company to apply this technique. Let's be the first QSR to apply this technique and vice versa. So, for us, we as an agency, we get a lot of pleasure out of working with partners across the space. I mentioned focus. And so, I think it's like knowing where to focus and knowing where to go broad. For us, I've talked about the three T's that we think about tooling, teaming, and tactics.   [0:10:27] Dave Goldstein: Oh, I like that.   [0:10:28] Rebecca Nackson: You can tell that I was a marketer.   [0:10:31] Dave Goldstein: The three T's. Notable Nackson.   [0:10:33] Rebecca Nackson: I like alliteration. So, we think that, when it comes to the tactics, maybe that's where we can be a little more broad and that's where we can look across the industry. And where we are really focused for us it's the familiarity with the set of tools. I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder being that I was a marketer who has hired agencies and consultants before. I know what the reputation can be of like, we don't want to bring somebody and who is just going to drop some recommendations on our desk.   [0:11:03] Dave Goldstein: You have sat in those shoes before.   [0:11:04] Rebecca Nackson: I have sat right in those-   [0:11:05] P.J. Bruno: Right.   [0:11:05] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. Which is so important, by the way.   [0:11:07] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah, I think so. It's interesting to me there's not more people that have been sort of on that side. But the ego in me thought like, okay, now I'm going to go out there and do that thing that I had done to me so many times.   [0:11:19] P.J. Bruno: Right.   [0:11:19] Rebecca Nackson: But so, it's really important to me that the entire team knows how to do the work. So, our suggestions only go as far as the tool that's going to be able to make that happen and vice versa. The stereotype about a marketer can be that you're going to come in and say, let's run a Superbowl ad. Let's not worry about how we're going to pay for that or measuring the impact. Right? We know that, when we're suggesting something to our clients, that the tools can do that. But the flip side of that is, there's somebody on my team who he is most excited about what can we do with Braze that nobody else is doing? Let's get beyond the obvious functionality and let's take those features and let's reimagine them in ways that nobody else has done that. Like he feels like most people are only scratching the surface.   [0:12:10] P.J. Bruno: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:12:11] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:12:12] Rebecca Nackson: So, it's actually that really pragmatic approach to understanding the tool very well that counterintuitively allows us to be super creative.   [0:12:21] Dave Goldstein: Yeah.   [0:12:22] P.J. Bruno: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:12:22] Dave Goldstein: And there's like a fine line that you need to walk when you do that as well.   [0:12:26] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:12:27] Dave Goldstein: It makes me think of a Tom Fishburne, Marketoonist.   [0:12:31] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:12:31] Dave Goldstein: He and I were cracking up yesterday. We were talking about this cartoon that popped up in my LinkedIn newsfeed where it was two panes. And, in one pane, it was an executive sitting behind a desk with like two subordinates. And he was like, we need to do something groundbreaking, game-changing that nobody has ever done before. And then, in the next pane, it was the two subordinates presenting to him and he's like, this seems kind of risky. Tell me some other brands that have done this.   [0:12:57] Rebecca Nackson: Oh my god. Oh, that's so brilliant. Well, we were talking about alliteration, but now the pun of like the fact that you're talking about panes. But the reason... Talk about pain, P-A-I-N, I think that... I was just talking about that presentation because another reason that I love consulting on what we do is that we do sort of bill ourselves as being part therapist as well.   [0:13:24] Dave Goldstein: I love it.   [0:13:26] P.J. Bruno: It's so good.   [0:13:26] Rebecca Nackson: And, I mean, that's that moment in that room yesterday, right? Where we're all like leaning in and we're watching these panels. And then, we have this moment of just sharing something. And I think that I felt very isolated a lot as the marketer. And so many times in our meetings, our client's eyes will light up at these different things that we're saying and they'll start laughing like, that sounds like us. You know? And they've really been presenting these ideas and they've had that moment of people pushing back. And everybody from every department is doing the very best that they can. Right? But we all have those moments where we feel like we're fighting this fight and everybody is just trying to tell us to stay in our lane. And sometimes, if nothing else, it's so important for another marketer to hear, I've been there.   [0:14:14] P.J. Bruno: The whole idea of the therapist, it just lends itself so much to customer satisfaction, customer experience.   [0:14:21] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:14:22] P.J. Bruno: And we just had Andy Carvel in here talking about that.   [0:14:24] Rebecca Nackson: He's a hero of mine, by the way.   [0:14:26] P.J. Bruno: Right?   [0:14:26] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:14:27] P.J. Bruno: You are fan girling.   [0:14:27] Rebecca Nackson: I am fan girling.   [0:14:28] P.J. Bruno: But he's over there looking through the pane being like, oh my God, is that Rebecca Nackson? Oh my god. But he was talking about like making sure you come to that conversation, and make sure it's bespoke, and make sure you're not trying to just re-kit their stack with things you're familiar with.   [0:14:42] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:14:43] P.J. Bruno: Listen.   [0:14:43] Rebecca Nackson: That was the thing that hit me over the head when I started consulting. I'm going to come in and I'm going to have this right way. And I'm going to know the to suggest. And I'm going to know the right way to suggest them. And the human aspect of this, of consulting, but it's what all of us are doing, right? The human aspect of what we're doing with marketing, that thing of saying, hey, person out there, I have a service that I think is going to make your life better, and you're trying to connect with the audience, that's in what all of us are doing. And being able to say to somebody else, I hear you. I understand what keeps you up at night. I understand the fight that you're fighting in the office. Maybe I understand the fight that you're fighting outside of the office. I'm here to make it just a little bit easier for you. And you guys are doing that when you're reaching out to your clients, right? The thing that I sometimes also say to our clients is like, give the salespeople a break sometimes too. Because they're kind of knocking on your door saying, hey, hardworking person out there. I have a tool that I think might make your life a little-   [0:15:45] P.J. Bruno: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.   [0:15:46] Rebecca Nackson: And we're all like moving those emails like into our spam folder. Right?   [0:15:51] P.J. Bruno: Right.   [0:15:51] Rebecca Nackson: But intelligently leverage those sales people, help them do your job. Help them make the case, right?   [0:15:58] P.J. Bruno: Totally. Don't just create weird friction because you're like, oh, your goals aren't my goals.   [0:16:02] Rebecca Nackson: Right.   [0:16:02] Dave Goldstein: Yeah.   [0:16:03] P.J. Bruno: Like arm them with the tool.   [0:16:04] Dave Goldstein: We're in this together.   [0:16:05] Rebecca Nackson: Right. But so, really being able to connect and really being able to come in and say to somebody, I hear you. And, exactly like you're referencing Andy's comment about, if you just come in the door and you say, I have a bunch of tools... Like I was in a pitch or a conversation where somebody said, I feel like everybody comes in and they tell me the tools that they have and they haven't even listened to my use cases first. And to be able to say, yeah, I understand. I've been in those conversations too. Right? It's always a reminder.   [0:16:36] P.J. Bruno: It seems like common sense too.   [0:16:37] Rebecca Nackson: I know.   [0:16:37] P.J. Bruno: But it really is... Apparently not.   [0:16:40] Rebecca Nackson: I know.   [0:16:40] Dave Goldstein: Is notabletherapy.com available? Someone should go on GoDaddy right now.   [0:16:46] Rebecca Nackson: I think I hear a pivot coming up right now.   [0:16:49] P.J. Bruno: That's an idea for some video content.   [0:16:50] Rebecca Nackson: Oh.   [0:16:51] P.J. Bruno: Oh.   [0:16:52] Dave Goldstein: Oh. Look at that. Magic is happening in the booth right now.   [0:16:57] Rebecca Nackson: Oh my god.   [0:16:57] P.J. Bruno: There you go. Let's take it offline. All right. So, anything that you're really excited about, Rebecca? We only got a few moments left, so just love to hear from you. What's big on the agenda for Notable? Big projects you're excited about, initiatives, partnerships, what are you personally stoked about?   [0:17:14] Rebecca Nackson: This is the part where my team is like already mouthing the words of what I'm going to say. But we are doing a lot at Notable with predictive analytics. We sort of like work with our clients on utilizing Braze really intelligently. And then, we're helping them measure the results of that. And we're saying, not only is A winning over B or B winning over A, but are you doing more than if you weren't doing anything at all? Now we're closing that loop and starting at the beginning of like, who are the audience segments you should even be messaging? And, if you were paying attention to the Cambridge Analytica stories, you know that there's positive and negative implications for this. But what I found really interesting in that documentary was this idea of marketing is not just about the right message, but also figuring out who are the people that you can even influence in the first place. And so, getting really intelligent about who are those Dave Goldsteins out there that, if you just show them that ad one more time for the sneakers, right? And the thing I love about that is, it was in the back of your mind, but you have a million things going on.   [0:18:16] Dave Goldstein: Yeah.   [0:18:16] Rebecca Nackson: And you maybe you forgot even for a minute.   [0:18:19] Dave Goldstein: Yeah.   [0:18:19] Rebecca Nackson: And so, you saw that ad and you were like-   [0:18:20] Dave Goldstein: Oh, I definitely forgot for a minute.   [0:18:21] Rebecca Nackson: For a minute. And there they were, right?   [0:18:23] P.J. Bruno: Almost ordered them again.   [0:18:24] Dave Goldstein: Almost.   [0:18:27] Rebecca Nackson: And then, on the other hand, those people that were already going to go out and buy them, don't show them. So, sometimes I'm telling people, it's just as much about who you should be messaging and who you shouldn't be. Right? And so, we love the science application that's now coming to the beginning of that. And then, that cycle. Then you measure its impacts and start all over again. So, that's going to be big in 2020 for us.   [0:18:51] Dave Goldstein: Wow.   [0:18:51] P.J. Bruno: Predictive.   [0:18:51] Dave Goldstein: Wow. I mean, clearly you are the consummate professional.   [0:18:55] Rebecca Nackson: Thanks.   [0:18:55] Dave Goldstein: You are an unbelievable expert in the space.   [0:18:58] Rebecca Nackson: Oh.   [0:18:58] Dave Goldstein: You know growth inside and out.   [0:18:59] Rebecca Nackson: You say that to everyone in this space.   [0:19:01] Dave Goldstein: I don't. I don't. But what I will say, your key differentiator, Notable Therapy. I'll tell you, I've walked a mile in those shoes, right?   [0:19:10] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:19:10] Dave Goldstein: Like that is so-   [0:19:11] P.J. Bruno: Those glittery pumps.   [0:19:11] Dave Goldstein: Those glittery pumps.   [0:19:11] Rebecca Nackson: Mine aren't nearly as great as Dave's, but I have walked in those shoes.   [0:19:18] Dave Goldstein: It's an incredible thing to be able to relate to people on the... Humanity in action. Right?   [0:19:23] P.J. Bruno: There we go.   [0:19:23] Dave Goldstein: On the human level. Right? Right? In a natural, considerate way. Yeah.   [0:19:26] Rebecca Nackson: Yeah.   [0:19:26] Dave Goldstein: And you guys are incredible. And thank you so much for all your contributions to the community, everything you continue to do. And I'm so excited to see all the levels up that Notable is going to take this entire industry. It's amazing to watch you guys work.   [0:19:41] Rebecca Nackson: Thanks.   [0:19:42] P.J. Bruno: Seriously.   [0:19:42] Rebecca Nackson: We talked about LTR last year. We talked about MAU last year. Here's to what's going to be at LTR next year.   [0:19:49] Dave Goldstein: LTR 2020.   [0:19:50] P.J. Bruno: Can you imagine? No spoilers, but... Anyways, Rebecca Nackson, CEO, founder of Notable Growth. Thanks so much for being here. Anybody out there, please, if you're thinking marketing strategy, look into Notable Growth. Rebecca has been around the block. She's been a client time and time again. She will align. She will find the best tool and the best strategy for you. So, Rebecca, thanks again.   [0:20:12] Rebecca Nackson: Thanks for that.   [0:20:13] P.J. Bruno: Of course.   [0:20:14] Dave Goldstein: That said it all, Rebecca.   [0:20:16] P.J. Bruno: Dave, the golden boy, Goldstein. I love you man.   [0:20:20] Dave Goldstein: Love you too, brother.   [0:20:20] P.J. Bruno: Thanks for being in here. And thank you guys for joining us. You take care. [0:20:24]

Nick D'Amelio, Director of CRM at Slice, shares his passion for CRM and pizza! He also gives us look under Slice's martech hood to see how they're creating interactive emails with Google AMP. Search functionality, feedback forms, browsing… all within an email!!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your MarTech Industry discuss digest. So thrilled to have with me today Gurbir Singh, Product Manager and good friend here at Braze. How are you doing Gurbir?   [0:00:31] Gurbir Singh: Good. How good of a friend are we? You still don't play video games with me, so.   [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: That's true. Also, he's my Rocket League compatriot that I haven't been able to get a game with yet, but now apparently he's a higher level and I'm a little nervous. To my right, your left, I have with me Nick D'Amelio, client of ours, Senior Manager at CRM at Slice. Nick, how are you?   [0:00:56] Nick D'Amelio: What's up guys? It's very great to be here. Beautiful new Braze office,. Very impressive. I need to get in on this Rocket League situation.   [0:01:04] PJ Bruno: Oh man.   [0:01:05] Nick D'Amelio: If anyone's ever done for some Smash Brothers, I'm definitely the guy to go to.   [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: Wow, wow.   [0:01:09] Gurbir Singh: You know what? Forget the podcast.   [0:01:11] PJ Bruno: We're done. So for all you listeners today, our focus is Google AMP. AMP is accelerated mobile pages. So we're going to talk a little bit about what that means, what that is, how it affects email, and Nick was willing to give us some of his time to show us how he's using it at Slice. So email has been largely the same for the past 40 years or so. People constantly talk about the decline or death of email, but it's still the standard for customer communication. But in the past few years, email has experienced a big level up in terms of interactivity, and no surprise, one of the leading trailblazers is Google as they released Google AMP. Gurbir, you're our resident expert with Google AMP. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is, how it came about?   [0:01:59] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. First of all, I hate that I'm the resident expert. I hope I'm not marked that way. But ...   [0:02:07] PJ Bruno: You mean a lot more to me than that. You're not ...   [0:02:08] Gurbir Singh: Thank you.   [0:02:12] PJ Bruno: ... Just an SME.   [0:02:12] Gurbir Singh: So Google AMP, as you said, is the accelerated mobile pages. So Google launched this initiative more than five, six years ago. The goal was to have mobile pages render faster, right? So websites that are being shown on a mobile device, just render it faster. One of the big things about this particular initiative was to get rid of JavaScript because JavaScript was viewed as bloat on a website. It caused a lot of loading issues and a lot of server to server exchange of data. So that's how AMP kind of started. Then from there, very recently, I would say in the last two years, Google basically created a AMP for email version of this. So it takes a subset of this overall project. This is all Opensource now and it creates an email version of this. A lot of the functionality that you would normally want to do an email, a lot of that interactivity, which people would do around, that they would want for JavaScript reasons, they now can leverage AMP HTML to do this, right? So that's how AMP email got to be born. Google basically pioneered this. They led the way and made it Opensource, so huge community behind this. Now you're seeing other vendors kind of attach themselves and say, "We also want to support this. This is great." We have a lot of clients who are super excited about it and they see the power that this can have.   [0:03:43] PJ Bruno: So the impetus for AMP pages was more about size, I guess, right? But for email it's less about size or ...   [0:03:52] Gurbir Singh: It still is about size. So as the mobile device came and people started using more and more of it, it became like, okay, anything I load on a device, the faster it is, the less bloated it is, the better it's going to work on my devices. So we live in a great country where we have fast access to internet, some really powerful phones, but if you think about globally, that's not always true, right? People still have older phones, older 3G systems that they connect to, so Google's attempt was to say I want information spread throughout the world. That's their mission and they want to make sure that can happen regardless of where you are. So AMP was kind of born through their mission statement and said I want to make sure that people can figure out how to get websites loaded on an older phone, things like that. So from their email kind of benefits because email can have a lot more information shown in it, but using this more lightweight newer technology so you can actually send in things like Java forms or carousels and you can have all this interactive cool features that email marketers always wanted to do, but have always been fearful for because it requires a lot more coding, a lot more specialized skills. Now Google's like here's a template. Here's basic components that you can use. Here, just do it. It's kind of cool.   [0:05:13] PJ Bruno: Very cool. Also just considering like so many times a blocker is not having the engineering resources to get something done, just putting the power in a marketer's hand, I think it's a beautiful thing. Nick, any hot takes on Google AMP as far as the origin story that Gurbir just gave us? Is it total BS or is it ...   [0:05:34] Nick D'Amelio: Lies and forgery, all of it. Yeah. No, 100% correct. Yeah. I only really started paying attention to it when it was announced for email since that's kind of my specialty. But yeah, everything Gurbir said, totally correct. I'm really excited about the speed benefits. You have about maybe three seconds of an email loading before a user just says, "Oh, this is blank. I'm going to close out, delete it." Also the functionality is just going to be incredible. It's a total step change in email.   [0:06:08] PJ Bruno: Nick, let's hear a little bit more about your story before we jump into all the facets of Google AMP and the functionality. So you're pretty excited about interactive email obviously.   [0:06:18] Nick D'Amelio: Yep.   [0:06:19] PJ Bruno: And I read on your LinkedIn passion for CRM and pizza, and I've learned now that you are also a pizza maker.   [0:06:28] Nick D'Amelio: That is correct. Yeah. So that actually came before my time at Slice and I think resulted in my time at Slice, but always been a big chef, but pizza I developed a serious love for. I've got a ton of equipment in my apartment. I have a baking steel, which is kind of like an enhanced version of a baking stone. I once hacked my oven to get to temperatures that probably were not safe for a Weehawken, New Jersey apartment.   [0:06:58] PJ Bruno: Hacked the oven.   [0:06:58] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, very irresponsible, but all in the name of good pizza. Yeah, and I've always just been really passionate about kind of the craft and artisianry of pizza making.   [0:07:08] PJ Bruno: So a passion for CRM, a passion for making pizza, and you play Smash Brothers. Are you single?   [0:07:16] Nick D'Amelio: No.   [0:07:18] PJ Bruno: See there's the rub.   [0:07:19] Nick D'Amelio: I have a very wonderful girlfriend.   [0:07:19] PJ Bruno: There is the rub.   [0:07:20] Nick D'Amelio: There you go.   [0:07:21] PJ Bruno: Well, I hope she plays Smash with you.   [0:07:22] Nick D'Amelio: Yep, she does.   [0:07:25] PJ Bruno: Awesome. Well dude, why don't you just take us through your journey because it looks like you got a lot of really cool things that you've had on your plate.   [0:07:31] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, totally. It's been kind of an interesting little journey. So I majored in Media Studies and Communications and German in college, so a bit of a weird combination. Where that landed me was a little German medical publisher actually in the same neighborhood my office is in now, Flat Iron District. So yeah, they said basically, "Hey, you're a child and you know about the internet. Why don't you handle our content management system? Why don't you handle our social media and why don't you handle our email marketing?" And not knowing anything about any of these things I said, "Sure, that sounds great." Yeah. So I kind of learned as I went and of those three kind of components I really kind of honed in on email marketing. That was where I saw the most impact. At the time at that company it was really the channel that was most trackable so I could directly see the impact I was having on the business, how many textbooks we sold as I was sending out these emails. So pretty exciting for a young kid. That led to my next role, which was purely email marketing, email marketing specialist at Macmillan Publishers, a little bit bigger of a publisher. They had a really interesting program. I was kind of in charge of the technical aspects. We had a grand total of around 20 users in our ESP at the time, which was exact target, none of whom had any coding experience. So I was on kind of QA duty, cleanup duty, so I got to learn a ton about kind of the ins and outs of email and email coding in particular and really kind of coming to grips with the frustrations that Google AMP, is actually going to address in terms of layout, in terms of functionality, stuff like that. So eventually I got a little tired of dragging a very ancient industry behind me in terms of trying to do new things and digital marketing, so I moved over to the startup world. I was at an ad tech company in the travel space called Intent Media. That was mostly B2B focused, which wasn't quite as exciting to me. I was still kind of longing for that kind of interaction with a customer. So eventually that led me to Casper, the mattress guys. That was a really exciting phase.   [0:09:58] PJ Bruno: I have a Casper actually.   [0:09:59] Nick D'Amelio: Oh nice. How do you like it?   [0:10:00] PJ Bruno: I do like it. Great mattress.   [0:10:01] Nick D'Amelio: How do you like their emails?   [0:10:03] PJ Bruno: I ...   [0:10:05] Nick D'Amelio: Tread lightly.   [0:10:06] PJ Bruno: Yeah. You know what? Are they a client? Are they a client? Do we know? They're not. It doesn't matter. You know why? Because I love the branding. It's all over the subway. Simple. Beautiful. Sold me on the branding and sold me at the end of the day, the product. Big fan, Casper.   [0:10:21] Gurbir Singh: And if anybody from Casper is listening, you should come join Braze.   [0:10:24] PJ Bruno: Yeah, come join Braze. Why not? We'll take good care of you.   [0:10:26] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Go for it.   [0:10:27] PJ Bruno: We'll take your email marketing campaigns. We'll make them beautiful.   [0:10:29] Nick D'Amelio: It's funny. We're on a podcast right now and maybe we could get them to sponsor us considering that's kind of what they do.   [0:10:36] PJ Bruno: That is what they do.   [0:10:37] Nick D'Amelio: This is brought to you by Casper Mattresses.   [0:10:40] PJ Bruno: I may or may not edit that out. So from Casper then, I guess how long have you been at Slice now?   [0:10:47] Nick D'Amelio: A little over two years now.   [0:10:49] PJ Bruno: Okay. So about two years ago made the jump from Casper to Slice. Pizza's your passion. Everything was starting to coalesce. This makes sense. What was the email programming like when you inherited that at Slice?   [0:11:06] Nick D'Amelio: Needed a little work. It was at a period of time where they were struggling to find an identity. They had just rebranded from an entirely different experience a couple of years earlier. Slice was formerly known as My Pizza and then kind of brought in some new people and rebranded. Yeah, so still trying to find their identity in terms of the branding, and then in terms of the technical aspects of the email program, very limited. Not much in the way of engaging email templates. Their audience size was incredibly small. They had limited it for effectively no reason. I had the suspicion that the IPs actually had not been properly warmed because we were seeing incredibly low open rates that really shouldn't have been like that.   [0:11:58] PJ Bruno: You didn't find out whether it was improperly warmed or not? You just were like, All right, well let's just find a solution.   [0:12:03] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, kind of the assumption based on what I knew at the time about engagement levels and now based on kind of the improvements we've seen, I think there was definitely some behind the scenes stuff wrong with the deliverability.   [0:12:15] PJ Bruno: You got got to warm those IPs.   [0:12:17] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah, Very important.   [0:12:19] PJ Bruno: Like a pizza.   [0:12:20] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly.   [0:12:21] PJ Bruno: You're going to eat cold dough?   [0:12:23] Nick D'Amelio: The difference is pizza is still good cold. IPs are no good when they're cold.   [0:12:26] PJ Bruno: You've got to preheat. Get those IPs up.   [0:12:29] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, that's true.   [0:12:31] PJ Bruno: For those of us who don't know what Slice is, why don't you explain what Slice is for those sad, sad folks that don't have it in their lives.   [0:12:39] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah. We've got to correct that. So yeah, Slice is basically online ordering for pizza. People have used online ordering platforms for their favorite restaurants before. We are exclusively focused on pizza, which lets us do a couple of things. We can provide an experience that's explicitly tailored to pizza. So a lot of other places, getting half pepperoni and half peppers and onions involves writing out special instructions that the shop may or may not see. We kind of have a little bit of a pizza builder within the app so you can choose which items you want on each half, which is technology that local pizzerias have been kind of slow to adopt.   [0:13:27] PJ Bruno: Because that's the charm of the mom and pop set up, right?   [0:13:31] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of low tech. It's very homey, very local, but the problem is these guys are kind of getting killed in the space by some of the larger pizza players. So we really want to kind of get them into the digital age and get people ordering online because that's where our customers want to be. Yeah.   [0:13:53] PJ Bruno: So what's the differentiator for Slice? What makes you guys stand out above the rest?   [0:13:58] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. A lot of the other places you can get pizza online, you've got the big chains and then you've got kind of the, what we call aggregators, kind of the big, big online ordering companies. Main difference between us and the larger chains, you're getting that mom and pop quality, which is really important. Main difference between us and the big online ordering companies is that those companies actually take kind of an enormous cut out of the restaurant's pocket when a user orders online. Basically what we do is provide marketing and technology and online ordering, paid search, a ton of services to these pizzerias for a very small flat fee on every order, which really allows them to grow their businesses and keep local pizza alive.   [0:14:52] PJ Bruno: God, I love that. Gerb, you're a pizza guy I've got to assume.   [0:14:55] Gurbir Singh: I do. I love pizza. [crosstalk 00:14:57].   [0:14:57] PJ Bruno: What's your type? What's your poison?   [0:14:59] Gurbir Singh: I actually just like a nice, good margarita pizza.   [0:15:02] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah.   [0:15:03] Gurbir Singh: If you can do that well, I'm a customer.   [0:15:05] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah, absolutely. Did you know that yesterday was the official birthdate of the margarita pizza?   [0:15:11] Gurbir Singh: I did not know that.   [0:15:12] PJ Bruno: What year was that?   [0:15:15] Nick D'Amelio: 1889. Queen Margarita of Italy visited a small Focacceria in Naples and he kind of adorned the pizza with the traditional tomato sauce, but also basil and mozzarella to represent the colors of the Italian flag. She apparently wrote a letter kind of praising this creation and yeah, that was the birth of the margarita pizza.   [0:15:38] Gurbir Singh: I'm surprised you didn't order some margarita pizza today for this podcast. I'm kind of disappointed now.   [0:15:43] PJ Bruno: Well, you know what? You guys just ruined the surprise because when we wrap up, guess where we're going?   [0:15:48] Nick D'Amelio: Oh man.   [0:15:48] Gurbir Singh: Margarita pizza.   [0:15:50] Nick D'Amelio: Nice.   [0:15:50] Gurbir Singh: Or is it just Margaritas?   [0:15:52] PJ Bruno: When was the birthday of buffalo chicken slice?   [0:15:54] Nick D'Amelio: Oh, I do not know that.   [0:15:56] Gurbir Singh: It was like 10 years ago.   [0:15:57] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, probably.   [0:15:58] Gurbir Singh: It doesn't matter. It's not real pizza.   [0:16:00] PJ Bruno: Not my slice, man. Not my slice.   [0:16:02] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:16:04] PJ Bruno: All right, cool. Let's jump back into your time at Slice because you take the reins. You had to clean house a little bit with IP, with deliverability. Obviously you have to create some of kind of like your first onboarding user journey things. When did interactivity become a priority for you?   [0:16:23] Nick D'Amelio: So yeah, we've always wanted to provide kind of a delightful experience to the user because pizza is inherently delightful, so we explored some other vendors for interactivity a couple of months into my time, but none of them were really a great fit. But now with Google kind of putting this out there, basically giving it away for free, we're really excited to start jumping into it again.   [0:16:49] PJ Bruno: It's just free then.   [0:16:51] Nick D'Amelio: Pretty much. I mean, Gurbir, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no charge to use it and yeah, it's just ... Yeah.   [0:16:58] Gurbir Singh: Yeah, AMP's free. You just have to basically register with Google right now. But I believe that's also going to change in the long run as it becomes a more community-focused initiative.   [0:17:10] PJ Bruno: Of course. They're probably looking for champions and then eventually it's like ...   [0:17:12] Gurbir Singh: Yeah, I think right now it's like you get registered so your email can render within Gmail, but as soon as some of the other ISPs like Yahoo and Outlook who have signed on make this change on their end, I think that process is going to slightly get updated as well.   [0:17:30] Nick D'Amelio: Right, makes sense.   [0:17:32] PJ Bruno: Let's get into the nitty gritty details. How is Slice leveraging Google AMP for email?   [0:17:37] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so we've got a couple of use cases lined up. We have a working prototype of our AMP emails right now, which is awesome. We have an email coder out in Macedonia on my team. His name's Arso. Arso, if you're listening, you are the man. He basically was able to ...   [0:17:53] PJ Bruno: Shout out to Arso. He is the man.   [0:17:55] Nick D'Amelio: He is the man. He was able to put this thing together in no time flat. So we are ready and raring to go once we have everything in place for him. But yeah, there's a couple of use cases that we've gotten really excited about. One as we've kind of alluded to is just the layout and design options that you get. Anything just as simple as an accordion menu or a sidebar or an image carousel, who doesn't want to scroll through a bunch of images of delicious pizza? It just kind of gets people in the mood.   [0:18:26] PJ Bruno: I'm starving right now actually.   [0:18:28] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, I know me too.   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: Just talking about it I felt my salivation gland just start going insane.   [0:18:33] Nick D'Amelio: This is my life every day by the way, is just stock imagery of pizza and photo shoots from pizzerias just constantly on my screen. Oh, it's torture.   [0:18:44] PJ Bruno: All right, so what else? Other functionality.   [0:18:47] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, other stuff that we're incredibly excited for, gathering customer feedback just directly within the body of the email. So Google AMP will have form submission available for emails. I would love to just have a user review a pizzeria just right in their inbox. Just make it incredibly easy so we can surface that data up to all our other users and continue our mission of just being the authority on pizza.   [0:19:11] PJ Bruno: That's exciting, man. You guys are on that. That front wave.   [0:19:14] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, exactly. It's exciting times. As we've talked about email hasn't changed in, you know, basically since the inception of HTML email. So this is the first real turnabout in a very long time.   [0:19:27] Gurbir Singh: I'm curious how this change for you guys, because I've heard this comment from other email marketers where a lot of the attribution they do today is driving traffic towards a website and a lot of the functionality you're actually talking about right now will allow customers obviously to remove that friction and just do it within the inbox, but now you're not going to be able to track website traffic.   [0:19:48] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly.   [0:19:49] Gurbir Singh: Email budgets when they're handed out at corporations, they're typically on what can you drive to the website? Now all of a sudden you're going to lose that. I'm wondering does Slice have a strategy for that or any thoughts on that area?   [0:20:04] Nick D'Amelio: We have not gone into it yet. You're right, just because this is such a step change, it's going to be kind of difficult to explain this to a lot of folks, especially when there's money involved. But if we can prove out the ability to kind of interact and eventually hopefully even transact in the body of an email, I think things will start to change slowly over time.   [0:20:29] Gurbir Singh: Cool.   [0:20:30] Nick D'Amelio: So no plan yet, but thank you for putting that in my head because I'll probably need to plan for that.   [0:20:36] Gurbir Singh: I just want to make sure Arso gets paid. That's all.   [0:20:38] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah.   [0:20:40] PJ Bruno: Well guys, this has been awesome. Nick, thanks so much for coming in.   [0:20:42] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, absolutely.   [0:20:44] PJ Bruno: Gurbir, thanks for giving me some of your time, bud. Always appreciate it.   [0:20:46] Gurbir Singh: Anytime.   [0:20:47] PJ Bruno: And Rocket League.   [0:20:49] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, let's do it.   [0:20:50] Gurbir Singh: Rocket League and pizzas?   [0:20:51] PJ Bruno: Rocket league and pizzas.   [0:20:52] Nick D'Amelio: Boom.   [0:20:53] PJ Bruno: Thanks for listening, guys. Come back again and see us. [0:20:55]

Julio Lopez (Client Strategy at Movable Ink) joins us at Braze HQ to share the concept of a visual experience platform and how it can be used to create not just dynamic, personalized emails.. But also to keep that unique experience in tact as customers move across channels and even onto a website.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest. And I'm so happy to be joined today by Julio Lopez, associate director of client strategy at Movable Ink. Julio, thanks so much for being here.   [0:00:32] Julio Lopez: Yeah, I'm happy to be here, nothing like a podcast for a marketing nerd like me to participate in.   [0:00:37] PJ Bruno: I love it, podcasts on a Friday. And thanks for coming in under these heat conditions. It's a ridiculous.   [0:00:43] Julio Lopez: It's really warm out. I'm happy that I got to make it into your office and cool off a little bit.   [0:00:47] PJ Bruno: And I'm glad that this isn't a video podcast because you'd see us both melting in our pants right now. But anyways, let's cut to it. Julio, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?   [0:00:58] Julio Lopez: Sure. My role within Movable Ink is to partner with key clients to identify and deliver strategy frameworks that drive meaningful results. I started my career at CheetahMail focusing on strategic email development and deployment. Then went on to lead the customer success team at RevTrax, which is an offer management platform. And before joining Movable Ink,I was leading integration work streams for Eversight, which is a retail pricing and promotion optimization firm. I've now been with Movable Ink for a little over a year, and it's my pleasure to be here today to discuss the exciting world of email marketing.   [0:01:32] PJ Bruno: Yes, and I'm so glad you were able to fit us in the schedule, man. Really appreciate it. So, why don't you just tell us a little more about Movable Ink for those of us out there who have not had the pleasure to experience your brand?   [0:01:42] Julio Lopez: Of course Movable Ink is a visual experience platform. And our technology enables digital marketing leaders to create unique, relevant and compelling visual experiences across email and web and display at the exact moment of engagement. We work with over 700 of the world's leading brands and have over 300 employees across the globe.   [0:02:04] PJ Bruno: Wow. I heard you say visual experience platform. Can you expand on that? What is that?   [0:02:10] Julio Lopez: Sure. A visual experience platform is a SaaS solution that allows digital marketers to free their data from the silos that they're typically housed in and activate that data to generate intelligent creative with millions and millions of unique variations based on things like consumer context, consumer behavior and third-party insights. And all of it is done in real time.   [0:02:33] PJ Bruno: Oh man. Cool. That sounds really valuable. So yeah, data silos can cause a lot of frustration for marketers, as I'm sure you've seen, who try to activate them. But applying that to email specifically, what are some of the ways that Movable Ink helps marketers take email to that next level with visual experience platforms?   [0:02:54] Julio Lopez: Well, our primary goal is to help brands create these one-to-one visual experiences that based on data, and there's a lot of ways that we can do this. It could be something more sophisticated, like pulling any customer's loyalty data into an email in real time and converting a points value to a specific reward recommendation. Or it could be something as simple as pulling in a customer's name into an email header and using a custom branded font. One of our travel clients use that strategy to add their customer's name to a header image, and it was an image of a boarding pass, and it was a really clever and eye-catching way to get the customer's attention. But to be clear, we do like to focus on more sophisticated use cases. And some of my favorites are realtime pricing for hotels and airlines, as well as real time inventory for eCommerce brands. And when I say real time, I mean that at the exact moment that the email is opened, the information updates automatically. And again, these are just a few ways that our clients are using Movable Ink to take their emails to the next level. But there are tons and tons of use cases that we've developed across all verticals.   [0:04:03] PJ Bruno: That's amazing. So, this real time aspect, it sounds like a fairly novel solution to a newer problem as marketers have access to these increasing amounts of consumer data. So how do you see Movable Ink bringing traditional marketing into the new age?   [0:04:22] Julio Lopez: Well, if I stop and think about the current state of marketing, it becomes really apparent that we're living in a visual era. Images and visuals are now the language that moves people. And I think this has led to an all new set of requirements for digital marketers. Brands need to create compelling visual experiences that are unique to the individual every single time that customer engages with the brand. But creating these personalized visual experiences at scale is really, really difficult. And the difficulty stems from the fact that traditional martech stacks weren't designed for the visual era. So, as a result, many marketing investments are no longer moving the needle. And not to put too fine of a point on it, but as the number of digital touchpoints continues to increase, the problem will snowball, and those unique visual experiences will only become harder and harder to create. So with that in mind, I think that marketers are kind of faced with a false choice. They can either create personalized experiences for small segments in a non-scalable way, or they can create generic experiences that reach a broader audience. And this is where I see Movable link bringing marketing into the new age. Using our visual experience platform, companies can thrive in today's visual era by freeing their data from those silos and activating that data to generate creative with millions of unique variations. And you're doing that across multiple channels and personalizing for every individual at every touch point.   [0:05:51] PJ Bruno: It feels like we're living in the future. So I want to hear more about visual experience platform because this is new to me. This is the very first time I'm hearing about it. So what other benefits do you see for organizations who leverage this?   [0:06:03] Julio Lopez: Sure. I think the core benefit is the scalable and personalized creative that's generated in real time, at the moment of each engagement. The scalability translates to marketers finally being able to move away from focusing on segments to focusing on creating these one-to-one, unique and relevant experiences. Also, because of the scalability, production becomes highly automated, which means that teams can now focus less on low level tactical activities and more on strategy to create those innovative, on-brand experiences that drive revenue. And I'll also add one more thing. One of the best things about a visual experience platform is that there's no need to rip and replace anything. You can use it with your existing martech stack, supercharging the value of those investments that you've made.   [0:06:52] PJ Bruno: That sounds like a game changer. But so something like Movable Ink that has such an impact, I mean it sounds like it could be complicated potentially. How simple is it to inject Movable Ink into a company's marketing initiatives, into their stack?   [0:07:06] Julio Lopez: It really is very simple. So the way that our platform works is that we look for a data source that houses customer information, and call up that data source every time the customer is engaging with the brand. So those data searches can be internal, for example, an API into the data warehouse. Or they can be external, say an API into a brand's offer management platform. Because our core focus is on activating existing data sets in real time, we are effectively partner agnostic and work really well with third parties. And we've actually got a robust list of existing partners that result in a ton of out of the box solutions. And we also regularly launched client-specific specific integrations. So because we're partner agnostic, we can supercharge the investments clients make in their existing martech stack by activating the data that's housed across all their vendors.   [0:08:00] PJ Bruno: Can you give us an example of how that might work though?   [0:08:03] Julio Lopez: Sure. So, say that you're a retailer with a loyalty program. A big part of your marketing efforts to this loyal customer base is going to be to have them redeem their points so they keep coming back. So by tapping into a loyalty platform, Movable Ink can pull in each member's unique rewards information into an email in real time, things like point balance. And taking it a step further, Movable Ink can then convert those reward points into redemption opportunities. So if we know that our reward is worth X number of points, we would only show the rewards within a specific threshold based on how many points the individual has in their account. We can then compound additional waterfall logic to surface the right loyalty content for the right individual.   [0:08:49] PJ Bruno: That's fantastic. As marketers, you and I, we understand the importance of personalization and how that personalized experience can be more immersive, as what you've described. On the topic of immersive though, I've learned Movable Ink is now powering augmented reality in some client communications. Is that for real? How does that work?   [0:09:12] Julio Lopez: Yeah, it's something that we're really, really excited about, basically because it's a newer way for us to deliver these highly personalized experiences in a very, very engaging way. And there's plenty of ways to delight customers, but AR has proven to be very, very successful. And I think a big reason for the success has been the easy customer experience. So a brand will simply send out an email with a call to action to the AR experience. That click on the email brings the customer to a landing page where they can flip through different background filters. And it's all done within the browser, so no app download is needed. One client example comes to mind, which was really, really popular and successful. It was Virgin Holiday's Wish You Were Here campaign. So when we powered that, the email had a CTA that brought the customer to the landing page. And in that landing page, customers were able to take caricature-like photos with Snapchat-like filters overlayed on themselves. And they were able to switch between five different destinations, so you had New York, Hollywood Las Vegas, Florida, and also a scuba diving destination. And the images that they took directly from that email experience were easily shareable to social media. So the reason why I think this was so successful is that, not only did this email serve as an entertaining and immersive experience, but it was also great brand exposure. You had all these shares going out that the brand team wasn't paying for, and it was on-brand. It was calling out what the company could do, and it resulted in sky high engagement rates across clicks, shares and dwell times.   [0:10:49] PJ Bruno: That is so cool. What a cool campaign, and a fun way to engage customers too. It sounds relatively easy to implement. I would've thought it'd been a little stickier. But let's switch gears a little bit. So you sit within Movable Inks client strategy team. That's right?   [0:11:04] Julio Lopez: That's correct, yes.   [0:11:05] PJ Bruno: Okay, cool. And you focus on retail. That's your vertical, right?   [0:11:08] Julio Lopez: That is right, yes.   [0:11:10] PJ Bruno: So what types of companies are you working with? And what are some of the common trends that you're seeing in the retail vertical?   [0:11:17] Julio Lopez: Yeah, so let me give you a little bit more background on that. So we went to market with the client strategy team in Q1 of this year, and spent the better half of last year planning our engagement model. My focus on retail is to work with our top 15 organizations and align directly with the executive teams that oversee all digital marketing, so not just email. So my goal is to understand what their pain points are and map out a framework for addressing those pain points. It's a very consultative approach that involves shepherding clients through their digital transformation efforts. And there's been quite few common themes across the clients that I've worked with, whether it's retail apparel, luxury retail or pure play econ specialty retailers. I think the biggest trend is how much more these marketers are being asked to do and deliver with less and less resources. I think we all know that retail margins are razor thin. And to survive, many of these organizations need to make some very tough choices to protect the bottom line. And what ends up happening is that, because the teams are understaffed, more and more focus goes to operations, since everyone is spread so thin, and the overarching strategy receives less attention. So I think it's clear to see that eventually this working model becomes unsustainable. So, smart marketers are realizing that now. A lot of the strategic frameworks that I design for my clients focus on automation, modularity, and more importantly scalability, so the few resources that remain can be deployed to focus on strategy.   [0:12:56] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:12:57] Julio Lopez: And then another trend that I am seeing is data cleanup. So over the years, brands, and all of us honestly, got caught up in this idea of big data. And we collected tons of user information, but we never really used it. And the way that much of that data was collected was fragmented and disorganized. So then we moved all that data to data lakes, which were mainly designed for data science teams to learn more about the customers. So, this ended up creating a different problem because the data became difficult for marketing teams to access, especially in real time. So, marketers are now focusing on getting access to their own data in real time to deliver these personalized experiences.   [0:13:41] PJ Bruno: Oh wow.   [0:13:42] Julio Lopez: Yeah. Now that I'm thinking about trends, I think this access to data is becoming more and more important because of a third trend, which is the exponential rise of direct to consumer brands. So, D2C brands are digitally native. So, from day one, they've had access to realtime data to personalize the user journey. So in order to compete, traditional retailers need to up their personalization game. D2C brands have set an entirely, entirely new bar for the shopper experience. They are more immersive, tailored, experiential shopping journeys, and all of that is made possible by how nimble they can be in activating that customer data.   [0:14:23] PJ Bruno: That's awesome.   [0:14:24] Julio Lopez: Yeah, I'm really excited about all this. I think that as we keep an eye on these trends, more and more retailers are going to shift their focus to these three things.   [0:14:31] PJ Bruno: You're really in the weeds with retail. You weren't kidding. What are some other trends that you're really excited about for the upcoming months and this year?   [0:14:38] Julio Lopez: Yeah. So, I guess taking it away from a little bit of the negative and more in the positive, one thing that I'm excited to see develop is the rise of experiential retail. So, the traditional retail model has always focused on the product first, but more and more consumers are looking for an engaging experience. And largely this is driven by the millennial generation.   [0:14:57] PJ Bruno: Of course.   [0:14:59] Julio Lopez: Their preference over experiences over physical things is a big part of their core values. So now you've got interesting concepts like DSW's Nail Bar. So I'm interested to see how retailers look to stand out from the pack with these experiential retail experiences.   [0:15:14] PJ Bruno: Fantastic. Thanks for sharing those, Julio. So, in talking about trends, we have to bring it back to the core trend we started this discussion with, and all around personalization. For those brands out there looking to up their personalization game, what are some easy ways to start right now? What are some quick wins?   [0:15:33] Julio Lopez: Yeah. I think a one easy win would be to leverage your website to personalize your emails. So your brand website will have a ton of information, including browse behavior, cart abandons and inventory levels. So pulling in that website behavior into your promo emails will make every touch point feel like a one-to-one communication to the customer. And we do this regularly for our clients and have seen some amazing results.   [0:15:59] PJ Bruno: What kind of results are we talking about here? What do you normally see?   [0:16:02] Julio Lopez: Yeah. So we tend to see big lifts in engagement and revenue. So, for example, we had Under Armour implement a reusable product recommendation module in their promo emails. And the recommendations were based off of website browse behavior. And with that module, they've seen a 132% lift in click through rates, and also a 49% lift in conversion rates. And I think another not so obvious result from this was that since the content is dynamic to the user, the email only had to be coded once, so Under Armour's saw a 75% reduction in the time it took to produce the email.   [0:16:39] PJ Bruno: Oh wow. Okay. That's definitely a hugely successful campaign. And I'm sure Under Armour lauds you for your efforts there. Good stuff.   [0:16:46] Julio Lopez: Yeah.   [0:16:47] PJ Bruno: Julio, thank you so much for joining me today, man.   [0:16:49] Julio Lopez: It's been great to be here.   [0:16:50] PJ Bruno: [inaudible] Come back and see us again soon, won't you?   [0:16:52] Julio Lopez: For sure.   [0:16:53] PJ Bruno: And you guys come back and see us again some time too. Take care. [0:16:56]

Marketing Boss Dom Gallello calls in from London to give us his story. From digital strategy in Tokyo to running marketing at Sean Parker's reboot of Airtime to now running the show at Badoo (internet dating founding father), Dom has seen it all. Hear his insights on building a beloved brand through creative positioning and emerging tech.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Brace for Impact, your MarTech industry Discuss Digest and today joining me from foggy London town. I'm thrilled to have this guy on the podcast, friend of Braze, and he's what we call in the industry a boss. [Dom Gallello 00:00:33], thanks so much for being on with us, man.   [0:00:36] Dom Gallello: I appreciate that very much. It's actually raining here, so London, will take it a step further.   [0:00:41] PJ Bruno: Classic London behavior. Yeah man, I was really thrilled to get on the horn with you a few weeks ago and just hear about everything. You've got quite an eclectic journey you've had so far, my friend.   [0:00:52] Dom Gallello: It's meandering. I don't know if I can say it's been purposeful, but it's certainly led me to the right places and the right opportunities.   [0:00:58] PJ Bruno: It's not about the destination, Brother. You know it.   [0:01:01] Dom Gallello: Exactly.   [0:01:02] PJ Bruno: Cool man. So, I mean, I'd love to just chat about, I mean, as you know, this is like an email series, but I know you have some experience with email at a handful of the places that you were at. And then also winning the Cross-Channel Attribution battle. Let's take a step back and go down memory lane a little bit. I know you're first big boy job that you had with marketing was overseas, right? You were in Asia for a bit.   [0:01:26] Dom Gallello: Yeah. So I am half Japanese and after graduating college in Japan, I started my career in a communication strategy firm in Tokyo. A lot of what we did was helped clients like Coca Cola or Visa developed integrated marketing communications, and really taking an agnostic view of different channels, and understanding how to weave them together to best deliver a creative idea. So I think it was sort of the first step in my journey towards understanding that not only does multichannel marketing matter, it is actually the backbone of building successful business.   [0:02:02] PJ Bruno: You were heavily involved in like more of building an experience, right? You were on that creative end of thinking about not just an email or a push notification but like experiences outside of the computer or the screen.   [0:02:16] Dom Gallello: Definitely, when I joined Naked Communications in New York a little bit later, I was working on a lot of global brands and really building out worlds for some of these brands. So a great example was Fanta, where we developed a world called Fanta Play, which was literally a world of animated characters that you teenagers and young adults could basically engage with. And it was not just sort of billboards or advertising, it was really playable games, and comic books, and telling stories, and building a world that we could invite audiences into, and allowed us to basically make every single touch point and invitation into some broader experience that we were developing. And that crossed the 193 markets. It was absolutely huge.   [0:02:59] PJ Bruno: Geez. And your role, there was, you had the zoomed out view of how all these things interplayed together.   [0:03:07] Dom Gallello: Yeah, it was a mix of sort of creative and communication strategies. So understanding how a play could be brought to life in all of these different touch points, and then weaving it together into basically market packages that could be deployed. So using different channels to solve different challenges, depending upon what your market needed.   [0:03:28] PJ Bruno: And at that point were you able to pull the metrics information on what the engagement looked like? Obviously it's tricky when you're talking about real life experiences and stuff, but what was the intelligence system behind taking in your understanding of how that was received.   [0:03:45] Dom Gallello: A lot of the digital content that we developed, and this is really sort of 2013 and 2012, were predominantly basic view counts, play rates on specific digital properties. Some of the basics of what we were looking at. There was certainly not tremendous sort of event-based analysis that was going on at the time, particularly in the world of digital advertising. And then you have traditional measures for sort of traditional advertising channels that were constantly being deployed by the Coca-Cola organization to understand the efficacy of our work. I would say things have advanced very significantly since those seven or eight years ago. And it's a very different world that we live in now, to understand, of all the channels that we have at our disposal, which are the ones that are really working for us. And not only that, how do you evolve your strategies within those channels based upon what you see working or not working?   [0:04:42] PJ Bruno: It's scary the level of detail we have in the insights sometimes.   [0:04:48] Dom Gallello: It can block your decision making some times, but it can also at least help you evolve your approach in decision making, which is something that we never had in the old and traditional world of advertising.   [0:05:00] PJ Bruno: It's funny to see the pendulum swing to the other side where the influx of data can cause that decision paralysis where you're like, "Oh geez, I don't even really, really know where to go with this."   [0:05:10] Dom Gallello: Exactly.   [0:05:11] PJ Bruno: So Dom, so first in Asia, you said Tokyo and then was it New York, and then the West coast or vice versa.   [0:05:18] Dom Gallello: So then it was in New York working again on sort of global communication strategy. That was again some of that Fanta experience I discussed earlier. Working with Visa to develop their World Cup campaign in Brazil. Really thinking about how do you build a centralized in global marketing toolkit that can be deployed and flexibly applied to different markets based upon their predominant marketing challenges. From there I spent one year at NCI, at a business school, really trying to make the transition from really sort of the creative side of what traditional advertising represents, which is creating a world and inviting consumers to come and live and breathe these worlds that these blue chip brands have been so successful at creating. And really trying to understand how to connect that to true business impact. And so that journey led me over to the West Coast to a venture studio called West, which helps build brand and go to market strategy for technology companies, big and small.   [0:06:23] PJ Bruno: Nice. And then after strategy, that's when you came back to New York for Airtime.   [0:06:29] Dom Gallello: Yes. So after spending some time developing brands, and understanding how to take a technology company, and inject soul and basically higher purpose values into that business, so that you can not only continue to communicate your offerings as they are today, but also extend your imagination for what becomes possible within a product or an organization in the future. I then decided to join Airtime, which was Sean Parker's group video chat startup, allowed you to watch videos and listen to music together. And really took over as VP of marketing. Early on I was a consultant helping to basically develop their launch strategy, and understand how to cold start a social network, which is no small undertaking in the world of behemoths that we live amongst today. And then from there, once we had the initial user base on, really working across both acquisition and retention marketing to understand how we could bend that growth curve up.   [0:07:32] PJ Bruno: So did you, you got FaceTime with Sean Parker?   [0:07:35] Dom Gallello: There was significant amounts of FaceTime with Sean Parker. Yes.   [0:07:38] PJ Bruno: Did he have the idea to turn it from The Airtime to Airtime?   [0:07:44] Dom Gallello: Sean for me represents a couple of things. First and foremost, he understands social networks unlike anyone I've ever met. He has a tremendous capacity to think about how networks of people interact. And so as he went from Airtime version one, which was a desktop product, in to Airtime version two, he had a very clear sense of how he wanted some of the social mechanics to work, not only to help drive the right type of experience, but also to enable growth that we needed. And I think that was a lot of his special sauce that he brought to that early Facebook days. The second part of Sean is that he has a very clear vision for where social is moving. He really fundamentally believes that the world of liking and commenting was going to give way to the experience age where we would truly be together with our friends. And so Airtime continues to be the manifestation of that belief that this world of asynchronous communication will give way to really feeling like you always have your friends in your pocket. And I think Airtime really has tried to deliver on that experience since its inception.   [0:08:50] PJ Bruno: Yeah. That vision still rings so true I feel like. So from my understanding, Sean Parker founded Airtime 2010. They had some hard years to my understanding. And then around 2015 another venture round, and then you came on board 2016. Is that timeline around right?   [0:09:10] Dom Gallello: Yeah. So 2016 and April 21st, I'll never forget the date, was the date that we launched the mobile version of Airtime. Which was a very different product than it was originally, back in 2012. And it was very much focused on close groups of friends who could get together in a room, and hang out as if they were hanging out in real life. It is a tremendous experience challenge to deliver from a product perspective. You're talking about how do you integrate 10 video streams, and inject music or video that synchronously plays across multiple devices and multiple bandwidth. It's a tremendous challenge to really deliver from a product and engineering perspective. And I continue to tip my hat to those guys because they are really trying to pioneer what the future of social will ultimately look like.   [0:10:04] PJ Bruno: So when they, when they made that pivot and tried to focus more on mobile and tighter groups of friends, was there an equal pivot in marketing strategy? When you took the helm, was it you got some sort of directive or were you given free reign to just do what you know how to do?   [0:10:23] Dom Gallello: There are some pretty fundamental principles when it comes to acquisition that matters in the world of social networking. Everything for us was about network density. So ensuring that any user that we brought onto the platform would have friends to interact with. That becomes pretty hard to deliver in a world of even performance marketing, where as good as Facebook or Snapchat might be at matching you to a user that looks like your most successful users, they're not great at delivering users that are going to be highly networked within a defined ecosystem. So we were constantly thinking about ways to try and, not only bring on high quality users onto the platform, but also create the right invite mechanics that would essentially allow us to grow the network through more attributed virality. And that was leveraged, not just across client side text messaging, but also with email, and ensuring that we were always trying to get to the recipient, with the user's consent of course, but from as many channels as made sense.   [0:11:34] PJ Bruno: How long were you there for?   [0:11:36] Dom Gallello: From, I started really my work with them, in a consulting form, in February 2016. And I left the business in February of 2019. So just about a three year stint.   [0:11:48] PJ Bruno: Man. So I sounds like you had your work cut out for you there. A lot of big initiatives.   [0:11:52] Dom Gallello: It was. I think a lot of where we first began interacting with Braze was really trying to understand how do we leverage modern multichannel marketing tools to really create the experiences that became possible on Airtime. And we had a lot of fun leveraging the Braze platform to do things like when Taylor Swift's music video dropped, sending out to our teen and college audience, 12 snake emojis. And they knew exactly what that meant. They would open up that notification and they would be dropped into a room where a bunch of people were listening to that music video. And you were able to experience that song for the very first time in a community of friends.   [0:12:39] PJ Bruno: That's cool.   [0:12:39] Dom Gallello: These types of tools are amazing. And a lot of the focus has often been on how do we sort of optimize these channels in somewhat of a siloed fashion. Thinking about just what are the right subject lines or delivery times or any of these sort of fundamentals of delivery that are often talked about in the world of retention marketing or life cycle marketing. And I think what's often missed out on is how do you use those channels in a way that allows you to build an amazing and unforgettable experience that your customers are going to love, and they're going to ultimately talk about. And so a lot of my focus has been, and this is true for me now at Badoo, but keeping in mind that these channels need to be treated with care and with trust. And that when we reach out to a user, that we want to ensure that we're going to invite them to something truly special, that they're going to love, not just sort of beating them over the head with messaging to do a specific action that we might be self interested in accomplishing.   [0:13:43] PJ Bruno: That's a great call, man. You got to respect those channels. It's not the old world of email blasts these days. You really got to get that permission. Make sure you're sending the relevant stuff. I love it. So one more thing before we move on to your latest spot at Badoo. So at Airtime, VP of marketing, right? I mean running the whole ship, did you still have that involvement in creative strategy the way you have in the past? Like the Taylor Swift thing, for example, was that a brainchild of yours or how much involvement do you have at that level? Because it seems like that's something that you're really jazzed about and interested in.   [0:14:19] Dom Gallello: Yeah. So we certainly had a relatively big user base. That being said, we were still a small marketing team. And every single person on that team had the flexibility to propose ideas to try it out. I think one of my favorite aspects about the Braze platform was that I could empower young community managers or marketing managers, who generally had very little quantitative experience, but could easily wrap their heads around what the power of a notification targeted to the right group of people, and attached with the right experience or the right content on the other end could do. And so we were constantly experimenting as a team around many of these ideas. I believe the Taylor Swift idea came from one of our junior marketing managers, who simply spoke the language of our audience, and came up with a great idea, executed it. And we saw insane open rates and insane participation on that experience. And we just continued to do that following the cultural calendar of our audience, and just intersecting with them in ways that felt relevant to the time.   [0:15:27] PJ Bruno: That's awesome. And so your transition to Badoo, was that, did they seek you out or you felt like your time at Airtime was coming to an end or how did that get that kicked off?   [0:15:39] Dom Gallello: It was a unusual LinkedIn message, as you can imagine I tend to receive tons of LinkedIn messages. As I'm sure anyone on that platform does in the world of automated sales outreach. But received a LinkedIn message from a Andrey Andreev, of who is the founder and CEO of Badoo, as well as the group of companies now called Magic Lab, which owns Badoo, Bumble, Chappy and Lumen. And so when Andre reached out, having sort of known about him peripherally as one of the fathers of the dating space, I immediately responded and said, "Let's have a conversation." And his brief to me, which was true on that first phone call as it is today, was essentially to help Badoo become a iconic brand. To provide clarity and purpose to this platform that has operated for 13 years but has not really had marketing leadership for quite some time. And to really sort of kickstart the development of an organization that could essentially engender the next phase of growth for them by investing in great brand, and great experiences for their users. And so that's a lot of what my focus is on today.   [0:16:54] PJ Bruno: Got reached out to by the CEO of the company. That's a serious headhunting move right there.   [0:16:59] Dom Gallello: It works. I mean when you're hiring [crosstalk 00:17:02]-   [0:17:04] PJ Bruno: It's effective.   [0:17:04] Dom Gallello: ... It generally is helpful when your founder and CEO is a deeply invested. And Andre, he built this business in 2006 before most of the platforms that we know and love today even existed.   [0:17:16] PJ Bruno: I was about to say, this is one of the first internet dating apps.   [0:17:21] Dom Gallello: Yeah, it was the first one to combine sort of photo albums with instant messaging. It's hard for us to imagine today, but the old world used to be, you had to get a paid membership, and then you would sort of send emails to people and it didn't feel like a chat. It felt like this sort of laborious courting process of these sort of one dimensional profiles. And he basically said, "I'm going to launch the first free product that allows people to sign up, upload a photo album and just get on instant message with people." And it's gone through its evolutions over time, but it's scaled to 425 million users around the world. It has a truly global footprint. Our major markets are South America, Western and Eastern Europe. We don't have tremendous presence in places like the US or the UK, though we are actively working on that. And it has grown predominantly organically since its inception. It was the first product to introduce so many of the features that we sort of take for granted today. They introduced the idea that you would have cards of people and you would vote yes or no. There are other competitors since then that have introduced UI to make that more fun. But the core idea came from Badoo. Or introduced the idea of using a GPS location to identify the people nearby. And today that is one of our most popular features, where you can just see the people around you, and the people that you've literally bumped into on the street. So this place has been an innovation warehouse, continue to pump out features, but they've just lacked that coherent story, from a brand perspective, that ties it all together, and that makes the product easier to talk about. So now a lot of my focus is how do I take the core brand idea and how do I inject that not only into the communications we do out in the world, but also how do I connect that back with our community. As a consumer internet product, the way we grow is not through direct advertising, it's by getting people to talk about us. And there are a couple of different ways you can get people to talk about you. You Can create the next generation product, feature, whatever it is that just blows people's minds and you just become the talk of the town. Those are really hard to come by. Those are sort of once in a generation shifts in a how people interact with products. And generally speaking, they tend to be pretty rare. What is more controllable, in my mind, is building a differentiated brand that takes higher order values and continues to connect that with their community. So a lot of our focus on the growth standpoint right now is really thinking about what are the types of experiences that I can build, and how do I use in-app modals or notifications to basically connect those experiences, whether it's an intimate concert series in a city, whether it's exclusive offer for a festival. All these types of things we sort of offer to our audience through a lot of the CRM tools that we have at our disposal.   [0:20:26] PJ Bruno: No wonder Andre was interested in getting you on board as far as connecting all these experiences together and having this semblance of a real robust identity. Badoo also have this data analytics platform that's proprietary to them, right? I mean it seems like the CEO is, from the beginning was all about data and understanding how the users are engaging with the platform. So I mean what a good foundation for the company to be built on.   [0:20:53] Dom Gallello: Yeah. So Badoo really prides itself on building a lot of its own infrastructure and internal tools. A lot of the reasons for that are actually rooted in privacy and security of our users. So rather than passing data between third party providers, which generally speaking third party providers in the modern era are extremely secure. The company has just taken a stance that we want all user data to never leave any physical or virtual piece of property Badoo does not have direct control over. So everything from our own data warehousing through to our own internal CRM tool has all been built in house. And that also allows for greater flexibility considering we are operating at such significant scale across so many markets.   [0:21:46] PJ Bruno: So just really quick, I'm curious because going back to, you mentioned about the capability of understanding the location of potential matches around you. Have you guys hit any GDPR snags? Or has it just been as simple as you give consent and that's what you're agreeing to and it's fine?   [0:22:05] Dom Gallello: Yeah, from a GDPR perspective we really have not had any issues whatsoever. Users provide us consent to share their location and we only share who you've bumped into once you've matched with them. So there's a consent, sort of a dual consent, not only from a legal perspective, but also from user experience perspective, that this person that you've both mutually expressed interest in, we're going to show you guys where you bumped into each other. We're also not like dropping a pin, we're doing a little circle that gives you a radius. But that's also because GPS isn't particularly accurate all the time.   [0:22:42] PJ Bruno: Got you.   [0:22:42] Dom Gallello: Really it's not been a tremendous issue for us.   [0:22:45] PJ Bruno: Sweet. That's good to hear. So from Airtime to Badoo, obviously different types of products, but there's a similar, I don't know, authenticity to the message about them, right? Because Badoo's dating focused social network and it's something like dating honestly.   [0:23:02] Dom Gallello: Yeah. So I'll tell you the difference of Airtime and Badoo. Airtime was all about connecting your existing friends together in a more authentic space. And it was all fighting the world of Instagram or Facebook that was teaching us to be zombies behind a phone, endlessly scrolling on the content of our friends. Badoo offers a pretty different proposition, because in the world of dating we are in the business of helping people meet. That may not be a world changing proposition. It is certainly a life changing proposition. We get messages all day long around the people that have met, that have married, or have had babies from our platform. And it's really tremendous to see the impact that a dating business can have on millions and millions of lives around the world. We have about a hundred thousand people each week, who when they delete their account on Badoo, not delete the app but go all the way to delete their account on Badoo, they select, "I met someone on Badoo." And it's that type of combination of human stories and data stories that is so powerful. And as I've gotten to know the community, and really tried to build a clear and purposeful brand for Badoo, what became obvious is that really real people are successful on Badoo, everyday people are successful on Badoo. We don't cater to Instagram models and Vogue editors and Olympic athletes. We have really sort of the full spectrum of people, of all types of paths and backgrounds, that use our product. And are ultimately successful because they are open and honest about who they are and what they're looking for. So as we continue to take this message and really connect it with our communities, so that they understand that this individual experience of opening themselves up is one that's actually shared across the community. And that there are different ways for them to participate. Whether it's commenting within the crazy comment section of our Instagram profiles, where we're asking questions to our community about what they really want, or what dating advice they'd give to their younger selves, or soliciting success stories from our users, or inviting them to community events or talks or concerts or events. The ability for us as a marketing and a brand organization to leverage modern tools becomes all the more powerful. Because as we build a world, we just create many open doors for our users to walk through. What's been amazing is that at Badoo, because of our long history, we have a tremendously enormous verified email database. And whereas at Airtime email was a nonstarter for us, because speaking with gen Z they open up email maybe once a week, during school, only because professor has sent them a homework assignment. In the world of Badoo, it actually does become extremely powerful and we're still sort of experimenting around the right way to leverage it. But certainly what has become pretty obvious to us is that we want to use it relatively sparingly. We don't want to sort of bombard our users with, here's a marketing newsletter on the Top 10 Ways to Date. There are many other brands that do that, but the thing that's going to actually make the greatest impact for us, and our business, is going to be using those touch points really wisely to bring our users into high fidelity experiences. That ultimately they get excited about and ultimately talk about with their friends. Our battle is won over the bar table where you're drinking a bottle of wine, and Becky's telling you about what a crappy guy Paul has been, and that friend recommends Badoo because Badoo stands for dating honestly. And they validated that by creating some movie cinema experience or really authentic concert experience or whatever else it is that we were able to deliver to them, because they were part of our community and they were able to open that invitation, whether it be email or notification or modal. The mindset that meeting a single person can really change your life is very true. It's a really amazing thing when you see the sort of flood of validation, again, that comes into our email inboxes, physical mail inboxes, or even just the data that we get to see. We're trying to do an undertaking right now to try and calculate if we can potentially estimate how many babies have been created off this platform. It might be fuzzy math, but it might be possible. I'm not sure that the conversion rate is going to be as good as an email, but we'll see what comes out of it.   [0:27:32] PJ Bruno: Cool. Contributing to overpopulation, you guys rule. Dom, a quick question for you about, you mentioned like obviously you're not trying to flood people with emails, that's not the point. But I'm curious in what ways is your team leveraging all that data that you guys get, to send more sophisticated emails? If so, just because from my experience, I've used Hinge, I've used Tinder, and I'm pretty sure I've only gotten emails when I've gotten a match. So is there anything else, I mean, not to give away your secret sauce or anything, but is there anything on top of that that you guys are toying with or trying?   [0:28:10] Dom Gallello: A lot of what we do, from a transactional standpoint, is really trying to apply new machine learning models to best navigate on a more individualized level, the best opportunities to deliver a message. And so we're constantly playing and trying to optimize on that front. From the marketing perspective, it is just being sensitive about the trust that our users give us when they allow us the permission to communicate with them. And so from that perspective, try not to invest in some of those newsletter formats, and really trying to make really meaningful, impactful and inviting emails are ultimately our objective on the marketing front.   [0:28:52] PJ Bruno: Dom, I mean, any parting words on winning the Channel Attribution battle. You've just left us with so much good stuff today. Anything on the horizon for you guys that you're really stoked about? Leveraging new technologies, new perspectives?   [0:29:07] Dom Gallello: I think my only comment is, that as someone who comes from sort of the more traditional world of creative, that we can't forget the importance of creating incredible experiences for our customers. Those don't always have to be digital. They can be physical as well. And that every notification, every email can be an exciting open door for a user to walk through, and really engage with your brand in a powerful and meaningful way. And from our perspective and the learnings that we've had very early on here in Badoo, employing this strategy, we're seeing how it actually impacts the way people think about our product and ultimately talk about our product. And if there's anything that is an end goal for us, it's going to be how people refer our brand to their friends. And so these tools at our disposal just really allow us to take our community and really connect them with our brand. So never forget the creative and what door they're walking through.   [0:30:08] PJ Bruno: I love it. So Badoo, dating honestly, connecting genuinely. Dom Gallello, thanks so much for joining me, brother.   [0:30:16] Dom Gallello: I sincerely appreciate it. And again, always, always a big fan of great thinking and work that Braze does. We'll continue to obviously stay close together, but I'm also really excited about the great things that you guys are going to put forward, and help push this crazy world of multichannel marketing forward.   [0:30:36] PJ Bruno: Thanks a lot, sir. Thanks for coming on and thank you all for listening. You all take care. [0:30:41]

We've all been a victim at some point… I'm talking of course about email marketing from political campaigns. Braze's own Todd Grennan walks us through the nightmare experience we're all familiar with and the damage it can have on your brand long term.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] Speaker 2: Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest. Today, I'll be getting some help from Todd Grennan, Managing Editor of Content Marketing here at Braze. So, we talk with a lot of clients and experts about best practices and strategies when it comes to executing effective email campaigns, but we don't hear a lot from the recipients of emails, those that are actually receiving the experience, but today that's exactly what we're going to do. Learning from the strategies and results of marketing teams is one way to gather powerful takeaways, but getting a detailed breakdown of the consumer experience can be even more telling. Todd walks us through a broken email experience he was subjected to compliments of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Now, they created this strategy and it's been used in many political campaigns to date. Here's Todd to tell us more.   [0:01:10] Todd Grennan: Bad political outreach knows no partisan divide. Back during the 2016 presidential election, we saw a lot of poorly conceived, ethically questionable email marketing from the Republican nominee and a sizeable amount of repetitive batch and blast emails from his Democratic opponent, but while the 2016 election came and went, political candidate struggles with their digital outreach have continued Even to this day. Political candidates and organizations have different marketing goals than brands and the rules they have to follow when it comes to outreach are different in part because politicians have exempted themselves from the anti-spam laws that apply to everyone else. Ultimately, they're still trying to use technology to raise money and build relationships with their target audience and that means that there's a lot that marketing growth and engagement teams can learn from political messaging even, or maybe especially, when it goes awry. Picture this, it's Thursday, May 25th, 2017 and you're a left-leaning individual living somewhere in the United States. You donate monthly to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a few weeks back, you gave $10 to the campaign of Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate running in a special election in Montana. When your alarm goes off at 8:00 AM, you brush the sleep from your eyes, make some coffee, and check your email, and you find yourself greeted by an email from the Quist campaign, "Todd, are you online? Todd, sorry to email so early, but this is urgent. Polls are about to open in Montana. If we can raise $75,000 by 8:00 PM we can fund our, get out the vote efforts and win the special election. If not, we could be in for a tough night". You open the email and find a solicitation for more donations from the Quist campaign. You consider for a moment, then decided against giving anymore money right now. You go about your day, head to work, a couple hours pass, another email from the Quist campaign appears in your inbox, and another, and another. Before you go to bed, you've received nine emails from them asking for money each with a click-baity, vaguely hysterical, seemingly randomly capitalized subject line. 10:03 AM: 5X match extended. Montana match unlocked. 11:04 AM: Breaking. Nate Silver's 538. 12:04 PM: Heartbreaking end. 1:03 PM; Stunning news. 3:03 PM: Please read. Do not delete. 5:02 PM: Urgent Montana alert. Five hour notice. 7:15 PM: Final request, Todd. 9:04 PM: One hour left. Quist loses, but you keep getting emails like these by the dozen from the DCCC, from other democratic special election candidates, like Georgia's Jon Ossoff, all of them begging for money. Their subject lines and body texts, swinging from champagne, popping declarations of certain victory to apocalyptic gloom. You unsubscribed from one email address then another, but the messages keep coming from the DCCC and from putatively independent groups with names like, End Citizens United and the Progressive Turnout Project. What's going on? You're a good person. Why is this happening to you? The short version, it's the DCCC's fault. Back during the 2014 election in an effort to juice the democratic parties takings from small donors during an election that, to put it lightly didn't favor their party, the DCCC pioneered a new approach to political email. Incessant messages, asking for donations, wild shifts in tone from email to email, highly questionable claims about funding deadlines and double or triple or quadruple donation matches, and the strategy brought in an enormous amount of money for the DCCC and its candidates, allowing the Democratic party to out raise Republicans by more than 30%. However, that extra cash did little to boost Democratic candidates and the emails themselves triggered widespread backlash, inspiring both a parody Tumblr account and a mocking song where all the lyrics were taken from DCCC subject lines. (music) Following the election, the DCCC doubled down on its strategy. Then a group of DCCC veterans went off on their own, founding a left leaning digital consulting firm known as, Mothership Strategies, that took this approach to email marketing and brought it to individual Democratic campaigns. Including Ossoff and Quist's election efforts. Between DCCC and Mothership, Democratic leaning donors have found themselves inundated with alarmist, frustrating emails for years at a time. Why do democratic candidates and organizations keep inundating their donors with aggressive, irritating emails? Well, because they think it's a successful strategy. Back in 2014, Steve Israel, who was then the head of the DCCC told reporters, "I apologize all over the country for the volume of email people get, but it works", and argued that the strategy had, "Revolutionized online fundraising", but while this burn and churn approached email can pay off in the short term when it comes to juicing your fundraising, there's a longterm cost. Michael Whitney, the former digital fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, described the DCCC's approach as a wildly deceptive, unrelenting approach that treats supporters like garbage. There's reason to think it's poisoning the well for future Democratic candidates and potentially driving down real voter engagement, which is what ultimately determines whether a particular campaign is a success or a failure. With the help of Mothership Strategies, Rob Quist raised more than $6 million and lost. Jon Ossoff's donations exceeded 23 million, but he lost too. Arguably, the only real winner on the Democratic side of these races was Mothership, which pocketed more than 4.2 million in fees for its efforts. Ossoff and Quist may not be the only losers over the long haul. A 2014 study found that people who receive DCCC emails made donations that were 15% lower in the future than those who hadn't received the messages, which suggests those tactics can drive down fundraising over time. What's the upside of all this? While the DCCC and Mothership have made a lot of questionable decisions when it comes to sending email outreach, ultimately it means that marketers have a chance to learn from them without having to make those same mistakes themselves and really, that's a big opportunity. So, let's take a second and dig into what the DCCC approach to email gets wrong. First, sending way, way, way too many messages and sending them too frequently. Look, no one wants to receive nine emails asking them for money in a 13 hour period. No one. That's exhausting and significantly increases the chances that recipients unsubscribe or start tuning out your messaging. Instead of sending a bunch of similar emails, send one email and use multivariate testing to optimize it. You'll send the best possible message to your audience and that'll do a lot more to drive donations or whatever conversion you're trying to encourage than a barrage of semi-relevant outreach. Second, they're sending outreach to only one messaging channel. Email's great. It's one of the best messaging channels for ROI and for a lot of customers it's their preferred way to hear from brands, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Some of your most valuable customers may not be interested in joining your email list and others are going to tire after receiving email after email and unsubscribe. If you only use one channel to communicate with your audience, that unsubscribe is the end of the story. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign aside, most political campaigns don't have a native app. That means that push notifications and internet messages are off the table for them, though there's no reason marketers shouldn't take advantage. A robust cross channel outreach is still possible even if you don't have an app. Thanks to web messaging, you can use email, web push, in-browser messages, and web content cards all in concert to engage your audience on desktop and the mobile web. This kind of cross channel approach can pay big dividends. According to research conducted by Braze, sending messages in a single channel is associated with a 179% increase in engagement compared to users who received no messages at all. However, leveraging two or more messaging channels leads to a massive 642% increase, which highlights the competitive advantage that cross channel outreach represents. Third, sending only one kind of email. Email is more than just a way to nudge people to give you money. It's a powerful highly flexible channel and it's just as good at keeping people informed and building relationships as it is for encouraging one more donation. There's nothing wrong with asking for donations. Just like businesses need revenue to operate. Political campaigns depend on donations to pay their staff, fund their ads, and support the get out the vote operations, but sending one appeal for funds after another is just as off-putting as a company that only sends messages urging you to make a purchase. It can leave a lot of people feeling like they're being treated like a living, breathing wallet. Instead of using email marketing campaigns to incessantly ask for money, the Ossoff and Quist campaigns could have mixed things up by using this channel to lay out their campaign platform, highlight endorsements and positive poll numbers, and asked people to volunteer. Making people feel invested in a campaign, or a brand for that matter, can do a lot to deepen their engagement and make them more open to your appeals the next time you ask them for money. Fourth, using repetitive and off-putting copy and creative. Let's be blunt. These messages aren't email copy at its best. They're built around scare tactics and the content of messages tends to be thin and unengaging. The use of images and emojis are haphazard and gives the emails a cheap unappealing vibe. Even worse, they keep using the same unappealing subject lines and copy over and over and over. Creating messages that keep your audience interested and engaged isn't easy. It's even harder when you send the same kind of outreach over and over, but with a little thought and care and the right marketing tools, it's possible to keep things fresh over the long haul. You just have to try. Finally, sending every message to their entire email list. This is a sin that a lot of companies are guilty of too. You have a massive email list at your disposal. You've got an email that you think is going to perform well. Why wouldn't you want to send it to everybody? Well, because one size very rarely fits all. The Ossoff campaign sent a lot of emails asking for money. While lots of people were unhappy about the outreach, some of the unhappiest where the people who experienced a barrage of these messages immediately after making a donation or setting up a recurring payment to the campaign. These people did exactly what the campaign had asked them to do and what did they get for their troubles? Even more annoying messages begging for cash. Avoiding this kind of situation isn't hard. If the Ossoff campaign had segmented their audience based on whether they'd made a donation or a recurring payment, they could have exempted recent donors from their outreach focusing these efforts on people who had yet to donate. Plus with this kind of segmentation, it would have been possible to carefully target future messages based on each recipient's donation patterns, potentially allowing them to turn one time donors into recurring ones using personalized targeted outreach. If you're trying to improve your brand's approach to email, taking a hard look at the DCCC's email strategy and doing the exact opposite is a good first step, but you shouldn't stop there. There's so much more out there when it comes to engaging your customers, whether it's additional channels, whether it's tools like personalization, segmentation, message testing and optimization. The important thing is to think seriously about what you're actually delivering to your customers. What is the experience they're getting from you? Why would they want to receive it? If you're not giving them an experience that they're interested in, rethinking things. None of these campaigns are trying to irritate potential voters. They probably all had the best of intentions, but ultimately they were serving up a really frustrating experience mostly because they didn't know any better. You do know better, or hopefully you do now, and it's something that you can avoid. It takes a little forethought. It takes the right tools, but you have what it takes to make it happen. So, please do, speaking on behalf of all your customers.   [0:12:33] Speaker 2: That's about all the time we have for today. Special thanks to Todd for giving us some insight. Let's learn from the mistakes of others instead of repeating them. Thanks for joining us. Take care.   [0:12:45]  

This all-star squad built out a multi-team marketing department to support multiple products for their first-to-market fantasy sports content provider. Hear how Veronica Hamel focused her team around the right priorities and hires to scale with speed and purpose. Jeff Singer provides insight into the technical side of integrations while Morgan Lee gives a marketer's perspective on channel expansion.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] Interviewer: Hello again and welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest, and this episode is the pain points of scalable production, and I'm so pleased to have esteemed guests with me today from DraftKings. Veronica Hamel, Veronica is the senior marketing director here at DraftKings. Morgan Lee, CRM specialist, and Jeff Singer, software engineering manager. Thank you guys so much for being here.   [0:00:41] Veronica Hamel: Thanks for having us.   [0:00:42] Interviewer: So where are we right now? It's All-Star break. Right? Is there seasonality to this? Are you guys kind of like in relaxed mode or reset mode or-   [0:00:50] Jeff Singer: Definitely, All-Star break is by far the quietest time of year for DraftKings.   [0:00:53] Veronica Hamel: From an execution perspective-   [0:00:55] Morgan Lee: Yeah.   [0:00:55] Veronica Hamel: I think it's quiet, but from a strategy and planning, this is like the peak time of year for NFL. The end of June, early July, is when we're doing most of our NFL planning and when we're starting to have meetings with our executives, and getting them involved in our strategy, and getting their approval, and all of that kind of stuff. So from an execution perspective, it's definitely kind of a quieter time of year, but from a planning perspective, this is like peak time for us.   [0:01:19] Interviewer: Right? It's just a different part of the brain.   [0:01:20] Veronica Hamel: Exactly.   [0:01:21] Interviewer: You just got to switch gears.   [0:01:21] Veronica Hamel: Exactly.   [0:01:22] Interviewer: That's cool. So for those of you listeners out there, those folks who don't know what DraftKings are, who's got the boilerplate? Who wants to do it in two or three sentences?   [0:01:30] Veronica Hamel: So DraftKings historically was a daily fantasy sports company exclusively so really drafting a lineup, and you kind of rack up points, and you score points that you're competing against another player's lineup to win cash. And so historically, we've been exclusively daily fantasy sports and then recently in August of this past year, we launched Sportsbook as well, so now in New Jersey only we have Sportsbook which is just traditional sports betting. Who's going to win the Super Bowl this year, for example.   [0:02:00] Interviewer: Gotcha. And you guys were first to market with that. Right?   [0:02:02] Veronica Hamel: We were, yes, in New Jersey.   [0:02:04] Interviewer: That's very exciting. Veronica, I think you're the most tenured person in the room. Right? You've been for quite a ride with DK. Was it four or five years?   [0:02:12] Veronica Hamel: Five and a half.   [0:02:13] Interviewer: Wow.   [0:02:13] Veronica Hamel: Yes, it's been quite-   [0:02:14] Interviewer: Five half and a half.   [0:02:15] Veronica Hamel: Quite the long ride.   [0:02:16] Interviewer: Jeez. And I guess that wasn't even that long ago, but for some reason in my brain, it's like smartphones didn't exist five and a half years go. I don't know why.   [0:02:24] Veronica Hamel: Well, some of the channels we currently use did not exist or weren't being used by us five and a half years ago.   [0:02:30] Interviewer: Right. So DraftKings sprouts up in 2012, and you joined in 2014. Right?   [0:02:35] Veronica Hamel: Yep, yep.   [0:02:36] Interviewer: So what were some of the initial priorities and obstacles that you had to face to get the marketing engine really humming? Like was there a team in existence? Were you kind of the first one of your kind to start out some of these initiatives?   [0:02:48] Veronica Hamel: Yeah. So as most startups do, we started out with a pretty big acquisition team, and when I say pretty big, I mean three people.   [0:02:55] Interviewer: [crosstalk 00:02:56].   [0:02:56] Veronica Hamel: But we didn't have anyone doing retention yet, so I was the first retention person to come on. At the time, we didn't have a ton of customers, and so the whole point of having an acquisition team first is because you're trying to acquire new customers and then once you have those customers, you then hire and kind of build out a more retention-focused team, and that's what I came in to do five and a half years ago. In terms of the types of things we were tackling at that time, honestly it was getting out an onboarding series. Like, we started out very, very slow, and we didn't have all of the sports that we have now. We were mainly focused on just MLB and NFL. It was a very different time where it was easier at that moment because we had less complexity in terms of sports' seasonality and the number of sports that we had. But we also were starting up as a company, and so there was a lot that we had to kind of take on and figure out how to navigate.   [0:03:48] Interviewer: And as far as customer-facing comms, you were basically starting from zero. The world was your oyster. Right?   [0:03:54] Veronica Hamel: Exactly, yes.   [0:03:56] Interviewer: When you jumped in some of your first retention stuff, was it cross-channel right away? What were kind of the foundations of that?   [0:04:04] Veronica Hamel: Yeah, so when I first started, we actually only had email. We had email in what we call site merchandising, so a couple of placements on the site that we were using to communicate to our users, and that was basically it. Those were our two channels that we were mainly using. Email we split into transactional and promotional. That was it. So it was a very few channels, and at that point we actually didn't even have an app. We were exclusively a web-based product. So from there, when we actually launched our app, we started then in push channels and started getting a little bit more into the mobile experience side. Pretty shortly after we got into the push side is both when Morgan joined and when we actually brought on Braze.   [0:04:45] Interviewer: So mobile wasn't even part of the game when you were in there?   [0:04:47] Veronica Hamel: No.   [0:04:47] Interviewer: And now is it the biggest part of your business? I mean-   [0:04:52] Veronica Hamel: So in terms of the app, the app is definitely a much bigger part of our business. In terms of the channels that we use, it's actually still a fairly even split. We see a lot of traffic coming from email. Then again, it's mobile email, so people are opening on their phone and going right into the app, so it's a little bit different than kind of when we first started where our mobile web product was interesting to say the least. Now, we've kind of mobile optimized. We both have that in terms of a mobile optimized site, but also we we direct deep link into the app and people kind of have a better experience from there.   [0:05:26] Interviewer: Cool. And so acquisition team of three.   [0:05:28] Veronica Hamel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:05:29] Interviewer: Adds Veronica.   [0:05:30] Veronica Hamel: Yes.   [0:05:30] Interviewer: Team of four. And then Morgan joins the following year?   [0:05:35] Veronica Hamel: I think it was a year and a half, maybe two years later, like June of 20-   [0:05:38] Morgan Lee: Yeah, June of 2015.   [0:05:38] Veronica Hamel: 15.   [0:05:40] Interviewer: And what was Morgan's mandate when she started? She was brought in. You had one job.   [0:05:45] Veronica Hamel: It actually was push.   [0:05:46] Morgan Lee: Yeah.   [0:05:46] Veronica Hamel: So when we brought her in, we were starting to experiment with push and kind of other different channels. And so originally the team was so tiny. It was me, you, Robyn, Jesse.   [0:05:57] Morgan Lee: Yep.   [0:05:58] Veronica Hamel: So it was pretty small, and at the time it was kind of generalists. Everyone had to do a little bit of everything, so I think Morgan got a pretty solid foundation of everything. But pretty quickly thereafter, her mandate was push and kind of figuring out this new channel that we were bringing on.   [0:06:13] Morgan Lee: Yeah. So I guess it really started off with email and learning how to code an email because that's all we were doing, and then we had one website where we were sending push notifications, but it was like once a week maybe. It wasn't really a strategy. It was just kind of, "Oh, we have a big contest this week. Let's send a push notification."   [0:06:32] Interviewer: And so still no mobile app at this point, or it was just kicking off?   [0:06:34] Morgan Lee: We had the mobile app.   [0:06:35] Interviewer: Okay.   [0:06:36] Morgan Lee: Yeah. And then, yeah, for me, I came on and, straight out of college, was just trying to learn everything that I could about email marketing, and mobile push, and CRM, how to send an A/B test, stuff like that, so I think it really helped me build a foundation for a lot of the skills that I have today.   [0:06:56] Interviewer: Gotcha. And so your focus was push. Is this when you started to move? I mean eventually after you hard-coded some emails.   [0:07:05] Morgan Lee: Yeah.   [0:07:06] Interviewer: You moved away from the generalist perspective, and people started kind of focusing and like doubling down on channels.   [0:07:12] Morgan Lee: Yeah, I was kind of email and push for quite awhile actually because we had different life cycles. So I was managing the inactive life cycle, just trying to get people to reactivate, for NFL mostly. And then as part of that we started... I did email, but then also it was like specializing in push and figuring out the best campaigns to send users.   [0:07:36] Veronica Hamel: We've actually had a number of different organizational structures, so we've gone kind of back-and-forth between doing it at the life cycle level versus doing it more at the channel level. So we had a push expert, and we've kind of gone back-and-forth a few times, and I think ultimately it's really where you are in your business to know whether or not which one makes sense. So we're currently more at kind of a user perspective, so we've got all of our different teams. Like, we've got some calendar-based teams, and they're all doing all of the different channels versus being really specialized in one. It's all based on what you're trying to do with your users and where you are in your life cycle as a business, I guess.   [0:08:18] Interviewer: Meta. That's cool. And so, yeah, I mean also... Jesus... Having the agility to be able to kind of switch the dynamic and chemistry of your team. I mean I guess it's crucial. Right? Sometimes people just kind of stack broken stuff on broken stuff, and it's like, let's let it work itself out.   [0:08:35] Veronica Hamel: Yeah. That's one thing that DraftKings has always been really good at is being agile and kind of changing with the times, and reorging, and trying to figure some things out. Maybe a good time to bring in Jeff because that was a big reorg that we had that has been kind of the most impactful, I think, from the marketing perspective, is adding a platform layer and adding some engineering resources to us. And that's something we never had before, and it basically was that. It was one of those times where we had said, "Hey, this isn't really working. Let's try to figure something else out." And we decided to invest some engineering resources from the marketing perspective, and here we are with Jeff.   [0:09:13] Interviewer: And here he is. What a good segue that was. What an intro, rolling out the red carpet, Jeff.   [0:09:19] Jeff Singer: Yeah. So as Veronica was saying, engineering historically hadn't had much of a mandate to help CRM. There was a Marketing Platform team, but it had been very focused on the acquisition side and sort of site merchandising type thing, so some of the critical sell flows along the app but not sort of the actual retention and-   [0:09:43] Interviewer: Right, [crosstalk] products.   [0:09:44] Jeff Singer: The things that Veronica's team was focusing on. So I kind of came into the Marketing Platform team with the mandate of just like, "We need to figure out this whole CRM thing from an engineering and product perspective." And so actually my first week, I went to Braze LTR.   [0:10:01] Interviewer: Hey!   [0:10:02] Jeff Singer: And it was a great way to really deep dive because I had no prior experience in the marketing world.   [0:10:08] Interviewer: This was like three years ago?   [0:10:09] Jeff Singer: No. So this was last year.   [0:10:11] Interviewer: Last year.   [0:10:11] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:10:12] Interviewer: Oh, right. Because you'd been with the company for-   [0:10:13] Jeff Singer: I joined DraftKings in 2015. I hadn't moved over to marketing until 2018.   [0:10:19] Interviewer: So you were at LTR last year?   [0:10:20] Jeff Singer: Yes, I was at LTR last year.   [0:10:21] Interviewer: Oh, cool.   [0:10:22] Jeff Singer: And also my first exposure to the marketing world basically, and-   [0:10:26] Interviewer: It was a lot.   [0:10:27] Jeff Singer: It was a great-   [0:10:28] Morgan Lee: He's grown up on Braze.   [0:10:29] Jeff Singer: It was a great way to learn a lot about marketing really fast.   [0:10:33] Interviewer: I love it. That's so cool. And so what were some of the first things that you were kind of tasked with?   [0:10:38] Jeff Singer: So one of the things we had been working on at the time is... For a lot of the transactional emails, we had a previous engineering driven system that would basically take the things we knew that was going on with the user at the time, and transform that into some text, and call Brace to say, "Hey, basically this is the text, go send this email." That obviously isn't great from a marketing perspective because it makes it really hard to iterate. Like, if the turnaround time on changing the text or testing something new out is a month, you're not really going to be able to get anywhere fast. So one of the first things I did was kind of help move a transition over to have those emails be based off of events in Braze and then allow Morgan and Veronica's team to really iterate quickly on those emails.   [0:11:27] Interviewer: So who brought Braze to the table? Like, when you made this switch to marketing is it around the time that... I mean you guys have been using it for awhile at that point.   [0:11:35] Veronica Hamel: Yeah, so we started out using Braze just for push. So actually that's not true-   [0:11:41] Morgan Lee: For any [crosstalk 00:11:41].   [0:11:42] Veronica Hamel: [crosstalk] messaging.   [0:11:42] Morgan Lee: That's how I became like the Braze expert because I was doing push as a mobile channel and then we started off using Braze, and it was like, "Okay, another mobile channel. Morgan, you can take this, and kind of run with it, and figure out basically how we want to use the in-app channel, and how we can use it to upsell users, and cross users over to different sports." And it just kind of became another channel that we could use for upselling and crossing users over and reactivation.   [0:12:11] Veronica Hamel: So it actually came from our product team.   [0:12:14] Morgan Lee: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:12:14] Veronica Hamel: So our product team had brought on Braze as a way for us to pop notifications in the app itself. So if there was like a place where rather than them kind of having to build a new placement or a new pop-up at any given time in the flow, they hooked us up with basically the ability to be able to use the in-app messaging for us to be able to manage a lot of those pop-ups. Whether it was like, "Hey, user, take the survey, rate your experience," all the way through to we have a user or a player out in the lineup, and we need people to know. So we were using it more for the product side, and then we had kind of realized, "Hey, this is pretty intrusive to the customer experience." On the marketing side, we actually would really like to use it and manage it to make sure that it's being used properly and really being used to benefit the user experience rather than just kind of pop-up notifications everywhere.   [0:13:07] Interviewer: Gotcha. Cool. So we've got Morgan working with in-app and push. We get Jeff in the mix. He's going LTR. He's learning all this stuff. You guys start to scale, and it's with sophistication. So I mean how does the nature of your business complicate email marketing? Is it pretty nuanced?   [0:13:23] Veronica Hamel: Honestly, it's not just email marketing. It's all marketing. The big thing for us is the complexity of the business. Even when we just had DFS, it was a ton of different users, and we know so much about them that you want to be able to use that data to personalize and give them a better experience, but we almost had data paralysis. We had so much to use that it was kind of hard for us to know, well, what's the most important split or the most important for a segment to create? And from there just getting more sophisticated. So that was when we just had DFS. Then we launched two more products. So we mentioned that we have Sportsbook, and we're live in New Jersey. We also have Casino Games within embed in our Sportsbook app, in New Jersey as well. So basically we now have three products and now-   [0:14:09] Interviewer: And that's all owned by you guys, you all-   [0:14:11] Veronica Hamel: Correct. So that just increases the complexity because now you have users that are playing one only. So you're playing only DFS, only Sportsbook, only Casino, or we've got people that are playing kind of all of the combinations in between of of all of the different products.   [0:14:26] Morgan Lee: The sports world too is changing daily, and we have contests daily, and you can basically bet on any sport, so it's just constantly moving and changing, and especially for email which is a channel that is a little bit more difficult to personalize. Like, you receive an email in your inbox, and that's it. It's not going to change.   [0:14:46] Interviewer: A lot of tools out there for that.   [0:14:47] Morgan Lee: Yeah, Braze has definitely helped.   [0:14:49] Interviewer: So, again, let's wind back. We're talking about multiple products, multiple channels. How do you even manage that? I mean was this going on before the multiteam things started happening or did that kind of bring about the need for a multiteam setup?   [0:15:08] Veronica Hamel: I actually think that was one of the biggest reasons why we then decided to invest Marketing Platform resources. So engineer resources for our marketing team was... As soon as we got to a place of having multiple products, we were managing the complexity on DFS. It was difficult, but we were managing it, and we were kind of coming up with some different solutions for us to use. But as soon as we kind of got into this place of having three products... And one of our biggest advantages in that space is actually that we have a customer base already who might be interested in those other verticals. And so in order for us to be able to leverage that and do it well, we needed some sort of automation, and we needed to be able to better personalize to these users without manually creating 10 different versions of a campaign. And that's kind of what we're working on now.   [0:15:54] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:15:54] Interviewer: I haven't seen any of your campaigns because it's none of my business, but do you guys work with Canvas? Do you use that cross-channel... You know throwing promotions between people across products to kind of get them deeper and deeper into the DraftKings bubble?   [0:16:09] Morgan Lee: Yeah, I think right now we're using mostly campaigns, but we have setup some things as a Canvas. Jeff was talking about how we're moving all of our push notifications, the transactional ones, over to Braze as one of the big projects that we're working on. And we're building all of those in Canvas so that we can test copy, and test personalization, and how we kind of want to alert users of tickets, and stuff like that.   [0:16:38] Interviewer: So the three products are Sportsbook, DraftKings Live, and Casino?   [0:16:44] Veronica Hamel: It's Sportsbook, Daily Fantasy Sports, and Casino.   [0:16:47] Jeff Singer: There is also DK Live, but that's-   [0:16:50] Veronica Hamel: DK Live is more of a content platform.   [0:16:52] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:16:52] Veronica Hamel: So it's like complimentary to our products.   [0:16:54] Interviewer: Oh, cool.   [0:16:54] Veronica Hamel: Yeah.   [0:16:55] Interviewer: And do you guys plug that as well? Do you have whole campaigns around it?   [0:17:01] Veronica Hamel: It's mostly secondary, so it's kind of in the same campaigns that we're doing. We're already talking about placing a bet, or we're doing whatever, and then we're also giving you content in order to have you make better decisions in drafting your lineup.   [0:17:13] Interviewer: Nice. Any other cool tech toys or strategies that you guys are using?   [0:17:18] Jeff Singer: So one of the interesting things in our industry is that there's so many different regulations, and almost every state has different regulations around what users are allowed to do, and that's probably going to continue to happen with the way the regulations seem to be shaping up in the U.S. Around sports betting and casino. So we've actually been playing around a little bit with Radar for being able to trigger things around knowing where people are and kind of adding more location context to some of our campaigns.   [0:17:50] Morgan Lee: Yeah. And we've also been able to personalize messaging in campaigns using Radar. It's different to say, "Hey, enter this contest," but it's even more personalized where you can say, "Hey, thanks for entering this stadium. Plan DraftKings tonight because you're already there watching the game." So I think that aspect too has been really cool for us.   [0:18:13] Interviewer: Did you see the CEO of Radar, Nick Patrick, at LTR when you were there for that first time?   [0:18:18] Jeff Singer: I actually didn't, but I think-   [0:18:19] Veronica Hamel: Yeah, funny enough, I actually think that's exactly where this came from.   [0:18:22] Interviewer: Oh!   [0:18:22] Veronica Hamel: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:18:23] Morgan Lee: I was blown away. I thought it was a really cool product, and I was like, "Veronica, we should really look into implementing Radar," and we kind of ran with it.   [0:18:33] Interviewer: What?   [0:18:34] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:18:35] Interviewer: I got to let the marketing team know this. This is fantastic. And so now you guys have the multiteam difference from what I have come to understand. You have your calendar team and your triggers team. I mean how did the idea for a multiteam setup come about and was it difficult to rally support from that executive team, right? Because I mean I guess it's kind of you, Veronica, who has to kind of round up with Dan and kind of let them know this is a priority. This is what we need to invest in.   [0:19:05] Veronica Hamel: So in terms of us deciding we needed it, basically where we ended up landing was 95% of our effort was really going towards these calendar-based campaigns that were, "Enter this contest today or place a bet on something that's happening today." And we weren't really focused enough on user life cycle, so we had some kind of set it and forget it onboarding treatments, but we weren't paying enough attention to things like better notifications for a better user experience, or you've got a player in your lineup that is projected to score zero points because they're out for the day, and all kinds of these small different things that were both user experience and player life cycle that we just didn't have time to focus on. When we were focused on the things that were happening today and tomorrow, we filled up 99% of our plate, and we just never had time for anything else. So we decided to kind of break off a team and have them very specifically think about things that are a little bit more user life cycle. It was made possible by Jeff and his team. So in order for us to be able to do a lot of these things, we needed these kind of event-based triggers and data that we were able to then use in Braze to trigger those communications. So it kind of was both. We weren't focusing on it, and we realized that there was a huge opportunity, and too, we now had the resources in order to be able to enable this team to be effective.   [0:20:27] Interviewer: Gotcha. And so, like you mentioned, you just didn't have the bandwidth because there's just so many of these high possibility conversion moments around user behavior. Right? And you just can't grab them all. So when you expand to these two teams, was there concerns that it could be too much? Every little thing they do, they get a ping, and maybe it's overwhelming for a user?   [0:20:51] Veronica Hamel: It's a great question. When we started thinking about how we would setup this team, we also started thinking about needing a Preference Center and needing the ability for a user to opt out of very specific communications. We also then were piloting an internal tool. We were working on [inaudible] prioritization. So to make sure that a user could only see one contact in one day from the broadest sense, so there's still obviously transactional emails that a user can see, and transactional notifications a user can see in the back-end. But if we were trying to get a user to... Either they're inactive, and they dropped off, and we're trying to get them to come back to the site on some specific promotion that we know that they've reacted to in the past versus, "Hey, it's MLB All-Star break, play in that.' We started kind of prioritizing the life cycle campaign above the promotional campaign, so we were trying to be a little bit careful with that. But these two can actually speak a little bit more to an upcoming project that we have on Preference Center that I think is probably going to help that even more.   [0:21:52] Morgan Lee: Our Preference Center right now does have some communications that you can opt in or opt out of. We have leagues where you can play contests with your friends, so there's a lot of notifications in your league if someone posts a contest. So we have some of those, but it's not as personalized as we'd like it, so we want a notification center that includes push and email and also has a lot of the different trigger notifications that we've added. So we have a push where if you have an injured player in your lineup, you can receive a notification and letting that user know that the person is out, so having a preference for that. Also, user preferences in terms of what teams they like, what sports they really like. So that's also a project that we're taking on, hopefully pretty soon, Jeff.   [0:22:43] Jeff Singer: NFL's coming up, so we've got-   [0:22:44] Morgan Lee: Yes,.   [0:22:45] Jeff Singer: A lot of other things too.   [0:22:46] Morgan Lee: Yeah.   [0:22:47] Interviewer: Are you guys big sports fans? Is it a prerequisite to join?   [0:22:50] Jeff Singer: Definitely not.   [0:22:51] Morgan Lee: No.   [0:22:51] Jeff Singer: I mean I am a pretty big NFL fan. There's a lot of people here at DraftKings who actually aren't sports' fans. I remember having to explain once to someone on my team, what I touchdown was.   [0:23:06] Morgan Lee: Oh, wow.   [0:23:06] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:23:07] Veronica Hamel: So [crosstalk 00:23:07]. From a marketing perspective-   [0:23:09] Jeff Singer: Maybe that's an engineering thing.   [0:23:10] Veronica Hamel: Yeah. That's definitely an engineering thing. From a marketing perspective, I think it depends on what they're going to do. So it's definitely not a prerequisite, but we do tend to hire, or we try to hire people that at least understand or want to understand because they're writing a lot of the copy, and they're talking to our players.   [0:23:26] Interviewer: I was just going to say copywriters.   [0:23:26] Morgan Lee: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:23:27] Interviewer: Right?   [0:23:28] Veronica Hamel: So from our perspective, it's much more important for people to kind of understand sports and have a couple of people. We do a pretty good job of almost having a balance between the super heavy sports fans that can kind of help and share some of that knowledge. And then more of the like creative, innovative marketers, we're not going to turn someone down if they're an awesome marketer but just don't understand sports. It's just a balance of making sure you have the right amount of both on your team.   [0:23:53] Interviewer: I mean it might be an idea to update the onboarding process at DraftKings to teach some of the... You know Football 101. What is a touchdown? How do I do it?   [0:24:02] Veronica Hamel: Well, maybe on the engineering side at least.   [0:24:03] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:24:05] Interviewer: So with this dual team structure, do you guys see an expansion to even more teams outside of Calendar and Trigger, or what does the next evolution kind of look like from your perspective?   [0:24:17] Veronica Hamel: Yeah. We actually just added a second team that is kind of cross product, and so we have someone that is very specifically focused on tech tools and process, and we're working with Jeff's team pretty heavily on trying to get to a place by the end of 2019 where we're pretty automated. And that has been a lot of work on both his team and my team in terms of coming up with the strategy and figuring out how do we test some of this stuff first before we just turn on automation and make sure that it's actually valuable. And automation is so broad that it's been a lot of strategic conversations around, "Let's bite off a piece of it, automate that, and then move forward, and kind of sequentially get to a place of better automation." So we have someone, Jesse, who actually was my second hire at DraftKings, and used to be Morgan's boss, who's been working very closely with Jeff's team on kind of automation, and tech tools, and process. And that's been really helpful to kind of push things forward a little bit faster than they were moving before.   [0:25:20] Interviewer: What other things in your stack are you guys working with? You mentioned Radar.   [0:25:24] Veronica Hamel: We use Segment today.   [0:25:25] Jeff Singer: Yeah, we use Segment pretty heavily for some of the event stuff I was talking about earlier. I know we're evaluating some kind of analytic tools. That's more on the product side than the marketing side, but as far as being able to understand how many of our users went through some flow and then the result of where they ended up.   [0:25:46] Interviewer: So between the three of you, you've seen a nice handful of iterations of the marketing team here at DraftKings. Do you have any like parting words for our listeners that are trying to build out a marketing org and balancing/juggling priorities?   [0:26:03] Jeff Singer: I think a big thing for me is just staying flexible and kind of being able to react to opportunities as they come up.   [0:26:11] Morgan Lee: Yeah. And I think so too, and it's actually gave me an opportunity to kind of move my career in the way that I wanted to. So I started with mobile, got really invested in that, and then learned a lot about Braze, and so that's now helping me on the triggers team where we're using a lot of the features in Braze to trigger notifications. So honestly think it can be good for a team to grow, and people can specialize and learn more about what they want to.   [0:26:38] Veronica Hamel: Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing is don't be afraid of change. Again, we've gone back-and-forth between segment-based to channel-based a couple of different times, and I think it really just depends on where you are as a company and what makes sense at that time. So hopefully, we have hired a great team of people who are super flexible, and they're willing to learn new things, and kind of take on new opportunities. And that's been the biggest thing for us, and just having a team that's flexible, and is willing to learn, and change with the times has been the most impactful.   [0:27:10] Interviewer: Don't be afraid to change. Stay agile. Will I see you guys at LTR this year? Maybe?   [0:27:15] Jeff Singer: Yeah.   [0:27:15] Veronica Hamel: Probably.   [0:27:15] Morgan Lee: Yeah.   [0:27:16] Veronica Hamel: We usually go.   [0:27:17] Interviewer: Excellent. All right.   [0:27:18] Veronica Hamel: Maybe we'll find another cool tool that we want to use.   [0:27:20] Interviewer: I think you just might. Keep your eyes and your ears open.   [0:27:22] Morgan Lee: Let us know who's going to be there.   [0:27:24] Interviewer: Absolutely. We will send you guys the lineup. So Jeff, Veronica Morgan, thank you guys so much for being here. Or, you know what? Thank you for allowing me to be here in your headquarters in Boston.   [0:27:34] Jeff Singer: Thanks for coming.   [0:27:35] Morgan Lee: Thank you.   [0:27:35] Interviewer: And thank you guys for joining us as well. Take care. [0:27:38]

Grubhub CRM lead and No-Shave November Co-Founder, Christine Hill gives us insight into, operationally, what it takes to have a successful IP Warming, survive a migration, and achieve high deliverability. Our very own Nicole Codd, previously at ReturnPath, adds her commentary from countless email setups.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and I'm here today in Chicago in the Grubhub HQ. Joining us today, Christine Hill, who is basically a Renaissance woman in the marketing org here. How's it going? Thanks for being here.   [0:00:36] Christine Hill: It's going well. Thanks for having me.   [0:00:37] PJ Bruno: And rounding out the group today, I have Nicole Codd, who's also in town from our success org at Braze.   [0:00:43] Nicole Codd: Hey, PJ.   [0:00:44] PJ Bruno: Thanks so much for being here.   [0:00:45] Nicole Codd: Course.   [0:00:46] PJ Bruno: This episode is focusing on avoiding migration migraines, and also talking a little bit about IP warming. Christine has gone through a number of IP warmings, and so she's going to share some of her experience there. But before we jump in, Christine, correct me if I'm wrong, you were a part of kicking off No Shave November, is that right?   [0:01:03] Christine Hill: That's correct.   [0:01:05] PJ Bruno: How did that come about?   [0:01:06] Christine Hill: That's a family effort. My siblings and I, we lost our father to cancer a number of years ago. No Shave November for us was a way that we could take that pain and grief and do something about it, knowing that a lot of people are affected by cancer in their lives, whether it's a close relative, a friend, a neighbor, we grow our hair for those that lose it. That's No Shave November. It was a way that anyone of any bit of means could donate something small or something large and raise awareness by growing out their hair and starting that conversation.   [0:01:39] PJ Bruno: I love it. I'm sorry for your loss.   [0:01:42] Christine Hill: Thank you.   [0:01:42] PJ Bruno: I'll be growing my beard extremely long, big, wispy mustache. Nicole, you're going to take part.   [0:01:48] Nicole Codd: I will not. I'm sorry.   [0:01:50] PJ Bruno: Well, not the mustache on that, but you know, just letting it go.   [0:01:53] Nicole Codd: I'll let my hair grow out. I'll probably-   [0:01:55] Christine Hill: Skip your trim.   [0:01:56] Nicole Codd: I'll skip my trim that month.   [0:01:59] PJ Bruno: Beautiful. Were you involved in the marketing strategy around that as well? How did you divide up your team there?   [0:02:05] Christine Hill: Sure. It's something that my siblings and I kind of divide and conquer. I'm one of eight. People joke about having a baseball team. We tell our mother that she had a business. So I'm a marketer, I have a brother who's an engineer, another one who's in finance, and you fill in all the spots and it's basically a business. We take all of the skills that we have in the backgrounds that we've established and we came together to do it.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: That's unbelievable. You guys are dangerous. I got to assume there's an ongoing text thread. It's like, "When are we all going to just start the real company?" That's got to be ongoing conversation, right?   [0:02:39] Christine Hill: That's been a background conversation probably since I was in my early teens, like, "All right, what are we going to do? Hill Enterprise. It could be something."   [0:02:48] PJ Bruno: Oh my God, that's so exciting. Eight. God bless your mom. What were some of the lessons and techniques that you took with you from that experience which launched you onto this bigger mission you have here at Grubhub?   [0:03:03] Christine Hill: Sure. With that one, definitely learning how to build an audience, knowing that there were people out there that could relate to our cause and our mission but how to have them hear of who we are, how to get that awareness out there. We started with maybe a hundred or so followers, and how do you grow that? We took to social and all the digital means, because that's where people are. And using that, we were able to kind of be explosive and target a lot of people with minimal effort and minimal resources and really get it out there. From there, it took off because people relate to what it is.   [0:03:38] PJ Bruno: Well, if you guys out there looking to take part, go to no-shave.org to learn more info. We'd love for y'all to get involved. I know I will be. Moving on to IP warming academy, luckily both of you have a good amount of experience with this, some horror stories, I believe. First and foremost, IP warming is crucial to get right for your deliverability. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's sending first small amounts of email and then incrementally larger and larger amounts of email day after day so you can get the respect of your ISP and they know that you're not sending out blasts of email to people where it may not be super relevant. What do you need to be able to do that? Those are your first sends. What needs to be in order before you click the send button?   [0:04:26] Christine Hill: First and foremost, you need a plan with IP warming. I think a lot of people want to jump straight into it, and it is something you can jump into and ramp up fairly quickly. But you should have a plan with calculated risk because if it goes wrong at this point, it's a lot harder to get out of the hole if you had instead set yourself up with a solid foundation.   [0:04:46] Nicole Codd: And I think that's the main thing that people tend to forget about, is they don't necessarily think about the ramifications of if it doesn't go well. There's always these business needs that are like, "All right, we got to get this IP up and running. We have X deadline. Let's do everything possible to get it there." And because of that, they end up rushing through it and don't necessarily have a successful warming and they got to start from ground zero again.   [0:05:09] PJ Bruno: And this isn't a new problem.   [0:05:11] Nicole Codd: No, no.   [0:05:12] PJ Bruno: So why is it still happening? Why does it still happen?   [0:05:17] Christine Hill: We live in a world where we want things done yesterday, and so we think with that we rush it. And second to that is that we don't think about all of the stuff that's foundational to ensuring successful IP warming. So setting up all the authentications on the backend, registering your IPs, verifying your records, splitting your audience, cleaning your list, I don't think a lot of people do that before they start IP warming or migration. If you do that, you're going to set yourself up for success because you'll be sending to people who do want your messages, versus becoming someone who is spamming everyone at once. And the email clients pick up on that, and they'll block you.   [0:05:53] PJ Bruno: You mentioned list cleansing. Now, what exactly is that for people who don't know what that is?   [0:05:58] Nicole Codd: Yeah, so at a base level it's essentially getting rid of email addresses that aren't valid email addresses. If I'm going to a website and I know I don't necessarily want to receive mail from that specific company but I want the deal or whatever they're offering, I'll enter a fake email address. We'll see email addresses that are just a string of letters or something completely unintelligible, or there's potentially typo errors. So, see a lot of those. Gmail.con, or Yahoo with one O. So list cleansing is the process of running your email list through some sort of service or something you have on your own backend to get rid of those fake email addresses, get rid of typo errors to ensure that you're sending to real humans or real email addresses as opposed to fake ones.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: Gotcha. I forget who it was that we had the conversation about list cleansing, but we had a client who was adamant about not doing it because he said, "We don't give up on our users." I was like, "You're not quite getting it, though."   [0:07:07] Nicole Codd: You've got to hang on to those strings of unintelligible letters. It's very important.   [0:07:10] Christine Hill: It might turn into someone.   [0:07:13] Nicole Codd: It's very important.   [0:07:14] Christine Hill: To what Nicole said, removing the mal form users, unknown users, and those who haven't engaged in years, and I get wanting to hold on to them for business needs, but there's a certain cutoff point that it does not make sense to contact them through an email channel. There are other channels.   [0:07:29] Nicole Codd: I think that's a big, big, big, big one. People are always sitting there being like, "But what if they come back? What if I send them this one thing and that's what revitalizes them and they want to order from us and engage with us?" The thing is, if they haven't opened a message from you in years, they're probably not going to.   [0:07:49] Christine Hill: The likelihood is slim.   [0:07:50] Nicole Codd: Right, and especially with most companies these days, marketing is everywhere and I'm not going to need a email to think about your brand. There's going to be other methods, which I'm like, "Oh! Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Let me go back."   [0:08:05] PJ Bruno: All right, story time. Let's hear about your first IP warming. We don't need to name drop or anything, but I just want to hear a little bit about the first time you came up against it, some of those challenges.   [0:08:17] Christine Hill: Oh man, there's been so many. The first, I have a feeling it didn't go according to plan. I'm sure we didn't really have a plan. It was one of those rush case scenarios, "Let's get it done in two weeks," when I think even in the best case an IP warming probably takes a solid 30 days, even with a small MCL. We probably went out the gate sending to all records and wanting to trigger a very large program, versus starting with a small send size, gradually increasing it, and in that hitting our most engaged before those who are less engaged. I do know that in that first IP warming, we hit blocks with Gmail, with Microsoft, with AOL. Once you hit blocks, it's a lot harder to get into the user's inbox and you are digging yourself out of a hole.   [0:09:05] PJ Bruno: So blocking meaning the users blocked you, not an ISP.   [0:09:09] Christine Hill: The ISP blocked you.   [0:09:10] PJ Bruno: Got you. Okay.   [0:09:12] Christine Hill: Because you were, in fact, spamming people.   [0:09:17] PJ Bruno: Was there a comeback from that? What was the reaction from you and your team?   [0:09:22] Christine Hill: Usually for that, you need to register it with the ISP and get de-listed and say, "I am a true sender. I'm going to take step back and send to you in a rate. Will you recognize me and like allow me to be authenticated to get into the user's inbox?" And Nicole, if you want to add to this from your return path experience?   [0:09:39] Nicole Codd: No, that's exactly right. I think with mailbox providers you're kind of guilty until proven innocent, honestly. Their job is to protect their users, so the people signing up to use their inboxes, and because of that you're starting out with basically a reputation where they're going to treat you very carefully. So their initial inclination is going to be like, "Okay, you jumped up volumes too quickly. We're going to just shut it off because we don't trust that you're an actual good sender."   [0:10:13] PJ Bruno: So what kind of metrics are you looking at as far as IP warming? Is it really just like open, so it's just getting through it alive?   [0:10:20] Christine Hill: Yeah. Looking at sends, looking at your rate of deliverability, your bounces, hard bounces or soft bounces, and some of that would be your list cleaning, looking at engagement, so your opens and clicks, as well as the spam complaints that you're getting and unsub. So it's really looking at the full spectrum. What is happening positively, what's happening negatively, and what is our deliverability? What is the rate of sends landing into the user's inbox?   [0:10:46] PJ Bruno: What about any big either misconceptions when you went into your first or second one that you're like, "Oh I didn't know that's how that worked," and/or biggest takeaways from one of your first two IP warmers where you're like, "Yes, this is going to stick with me forever because I recognize how valuable it is."   [0:11:04] Christine Hill: One for me, looking at the metrics, looking at unsub versus spam, spam is worse to have a than unsub because unsub, you're telling me you don't want to receive my messages. I'll remove you. That's better than you marking me as spam, because when that happens then the email clients have that and it can push you off of landing in the inbox. Going through the first few, I realized that that's more important, and tied to that would be the list cleaning because if you had lists clean, you'd be sending to people who will likely be opening and not unsubscribing or marking you as spam.   [0:11:35] PJ Bruno: Interesting question here. Have you seen strategies where people make that unsub link a little more visible? Just because obviously pretty much every time I've seen it, it's the same thing that you've all seen. It's super small, it's at the very bottom, there's no context around it. Then you click and you link out and you do the motions.   [0:11:53] Christine Hill: So of the best practices is to put that unsub in the header. There are a lot of ESPs that make that very easy to do, or in Gmail if you have it a you're more likely to get through. And then those users who don't want to hear from you can click it versus marketing you as spam or filtering you to your spam folder.   [0:12:08] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:12:09] Nicole Codd: And also, even outside of that list unsubscribe header, something I've advised clients to do in the past is to move the little unsubscribe link at the bottom up towards the top, potentially. Because if I don't want your mail, my initial inclination is going to be to mark it as spam, not to scroll to the bottom of the email and click the unsubscribe link. That's going to take too much work and requires me going through the entire email.   [0:12:36] Christine Hill: In some of the migrations that we've done, when you've been part of another brand that then became part of Grubhub, we've put it in the body of the email, which might sound crazy, but it is that way for the user to hit unsub versus spam.   [0:12:48] PJ Bruno: And also they're making that transition, and so you guys are being super forthcoming with that opportunity. Well, I'm glad you mentioned migration. Why don't we migrate over to migration conversation? You've had a handful of those, and it's great. It means you found a better tool to support you and everything, but how can you be more agile and efficient beforehand? Because sometimes that eagerness can blind you to what it actually takes to get it done. So what does it take?   [0:13:14] Christine Hill: Again, IP warming, having a plan and having a realistic timeline. This is something that people rush a lot, but before all of that, it really is data. Understanding the data you have, how to map the data over to the new platform, and data in, data out. So what you're starting with is what you'll be working with. A lot of people will rush it with unclean data and will fix it later. Then, again, you're putting yourself back behind the starting line. So it's really the time to take to do it right, if allowed.   [0:13:46] Nicole Codd: And I think something people forget about is the time piece. So if you're on one platform and contract's coming up for renewal and you know you're migrating over to another platform, it's so important that you're putting that into motion well before you have to be off of that other platform, because mistakes happen. It always takes longer than you think it's going to, and it's way better to be fully moved over before you have to be off than to be trying to add months on and be like, "Oh my gosh, we need a few more months here before we can be fully on to this other platform." It'll just go much more smoothly if there's plenty of time in between.   [0:14:30] PJ Bruno: Without getting too nitty gritty into the details, are there steps to a migration? Obviously, the data needs to go from here to here. We need to make sure there's enough time. What are the pieces in between all that?   [0:14:44] Nicole Codd: The data mapping, ensuring that ... Something I see with a lot of clients is, like Christine said, it's kind of like a hodgepodge of data. And so ensuring you have something on your backend that is like, "This means X and this means Y," so that when you move it over it matches exactly. Because it's going to be a problem if one side says one thing, you move it over, and someone's like, "Oh, I thought this meant that." So ensuring you have proper data mapping on the backend.   [0:15:16] PJ Bruno: How much time do you like to give for a migration? What's the timeline?   [0:15:20] Christine Hill: It really depends on the amount of programs you're moving over and your list size. Part of it is that IP warming piece where you have to establish the IP and the domains and grow that up to be able to send, and second to that is being able to send your program, so your welcome stream, your reactivation, one offs, abandon cart, all of those things. Your list size could be 1 million, it could be 16 million. Those would take different lengths of time to migrate. The other thing that I've noticed a lot with migrations is people want to go out and launch a program that's easy to get up and running, so maybe like a one-off campaign, so a blast. That's not the way to do it. It's to do the gradual sends. So establish a program that isn't gated by a specific time. A welcome series could be a good one because you know that there's users just signed up and are engaged with your product or service, but in a way that are you okay with them receiving it in the first five days of becoming a user or the first one? Because if it's the first one and you have a large increase of users and you're not quite yet warmed, you won't be able to send to them.   [0:16:24] PJ Bruno: Okay. Story time once more, and you can choose what the prompt is. It's either/or. You can tell us about your biggest success with migration or one thing you wish you could do over again.   [0:16:37] Christine Hill: I have a biggest success one, I'd say. Grubhub, as we do, acquired another brand. We were given a very, very tight timeline to turn it around and migrate the users over into our full Grubhub experience, which would offer more restaurants, drivers, and a more powerful network for our users and our diners. There were a lot of records, and ones that typically we would scrub out, people who haven't been engaged in a very long time, that we wanted to hit, because as a business we believe that there could be some return. So there was a very big lesson. I was working with Braze's deliverability team. My initial thought at seeing this plan is, "There's no way we can hit these records. We will be blacklisted on every platform." I was pressed to do it and I said, "Okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this in the most calculated way that I can, a calculated risk, that ensures that we can maintain deliverability in some of the ESPs, like hopefully." It was a very, very old audience and I sliced the heck out of it to find the most engaged of this entire unengaged audience. I called it unfavorables, and I said that given the volume that we're sending to people who are engaged, who want to hear from Grubhub, we can only 10% of unfavorables of that total volume getting emails a day. And I started with the most engaged of this least engaged, stacked against Grubhub's very engaged. And day over day, and this was a 14-day migration that should have probably been 30 plus, I monitored it in the morning, in the mid day, in the evening, in the late evening. I knew that if any one thing went off, that I needed to be able to adjust it. I said, "I will do this, but I need the keys to be able to adjust it." We get through day one and day two, surprisingly not hitting any blocks, and I'm getting pressure to increase that 10% to a 20. Held my ground and did not and continued to say, "You know, we're prioritizing the most engaged of the unfavorables, and this percentage." We get through it and we're trickling through all the way through the list. And I think it came from Andrea on your delivery team was, "That's amazing. I'm not quite sure how you did that, but you were able to get through it." So that's my thought, too. Some deliverability god was looking down upon me. Again, as calculated of a risk as I could take, but knowing that what I was doing is not what I would choose to be doing, but for the business it made sense to push through. It was probably my most proud moment. I said, "If I can get through through this set of audience, I could migrate any audience."   [0:19:12] PJ Bruno: Yeah, totally. So when it comes to migration, good rule of thumb is do it bit by bit, monitor all the way.   [0:19:20] Christine Hill: And don't be afraid to adjust. If you do run into a block, it's better to adjust to take the time to do it then, versus to really put yourself back.   [0:19:29] Nicole Codd: That's huge. That's something everyone always forgets, too. They set this plan in place and they're like, "All right, I'm just going to let it run and let it sit." Having the ability to be able to be like, "All right, we're going to bump back today, or maybe we stay at the same volume for another few days," that's huge and that's not something people always think about. It tends to be a set it and forget it exercise, which doesn't work.   [0:19:53] PJ Bruno: It's a common thing we see with people taking automation in their hands. They think it's like, "Oh great, the job's done now." But I think the job's just beginning. You need to stay close to that.   [0:20:04] Christine Hill: I think for us, especially moving more and more over to the Braze platform, we shifted our email and our push and we use your in-app. Looking at our marketing holistically, omni-channel messaging for our users and hitting them on the channel that they are most engaged. So understanding that it might not be email, it might be push, it could be in-app, and having that congruent flow for a user. If we push you, what are you then seeing in our app? What are you then getting in your email later? And it's really opening up the door for us to be able to do that and to do it in real time, which is something before this, and when I first joined two and a half years ago, we were on multiple platforms and nothing was talking to each other. We couldn't have a program like that.   [0:20:47] PJ Bruno: Two and a half years is such a small amount of time. It's crazy. When you were telling me earlier that it was a team of two when you started, and now it's massive.   [0:20:56] Christine Hill: That's just an explanation of the growth here. It truly is explosive, and with that, we're not afraid to be taking risks and innovating. That to me is exciting, and it's nice to have a larger team and that manpower to do it.   [0:21:09] PJ Bruno: Love it. Also, you guys recently bought Tapingo, which is kind of Grubhub for college kids. Since you do have your hands in most things marketing here, is there something you guys are doing differently with your approach to that demographic?   [0:21:26] Christine Hill: We are. Tapingo is becoming Grubhub campus dining, and it's a whole new instance of Grubhub tailored to students, things that are in and around their campus, identity experience fit for that demographic that they'll use in their time in college. And as they graduate out of college, they'll graduate onto full Grubhub. But something that is more personalized for them.   [0:21:50] PJ Bruno: Now we've got to just do it for toddlers. We got to start them super young.   [0:21:54] Christine Hill: If you get them young, you can keep them longer.   [0:21:57] Nicole Codd: It's all about retention, you know?   [0:21:59] PJ Bruno: That's what I'm saying. We don't give up on our users. Awesome. Christine Hill, thanks so much for giving us your time.   [0:22:05] Christine Hill: Yeah, thank you.   [0:22:06] PJ Bruno: Nicole, thank you so much for being here in Chicago.   [0:22:08] Nicole Codd: Yeah, thanks for having me.   [0:22:10] PJ Bruno: And thank you for being here. Bye. [0:22:13]

Braze founders, Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman, recount the beginnings of Braze. From fast times at Bridgewater to top honors at TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, hear about the humble beginnings that soon evolved into best-in-class customer engagement platform.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact your martech industry discuss digest. So thrilled today to have two esteemed guests with me. You know them as the founders of Braze, CEO, Bill Magnuson and CTO-   [0:00:32] Jon Hyman: Jon Hyman.   [0:00:32] PJ: There he is to my right. Jon, Bill, welcome.   [0:00:36] Bill Magnuson: Thanks for having us.   [0:00:36] Jon Hyman: Thank you PJ.   [0:00:38] PJ: And so you know why we're here, right? We want to hear the story. We want the uncut, behind the music for Braze, formerly Appboy.   [0:00:48] Bill Magnuson: We first met in Westport, Connecticut working for a company called Bridgewater Associates. They have been notorious more recently for a lot of things about their culture. You know that I would encourage our listeners to go and read about either in Dealbreaker if you like a good story or in the New York Times, if you want a slightly more journalistic integrity, if you will. But, when I joined Bridgewater after finishing up my master's degree, I joined up and I was actually on Jon's team, he was my team lead when we got started.   [0:01:19] Jon Hyman: Yeah, actually had to give Bill a great project of going through all of the services that we owned on Internet Explorer 6 and seeing if they could work under Internet Explorer 8.   [0:01:30] Bill Magnuson: Yeah, I think it was about 235 different projects and I didn't know how any of them were supposed to work. My directions were just try and figure out how each one of them works and see if any of them don't work when you go into a more modern browser. And this was, I think, still years behind cutting edge.   [0:01:47] PJ: Gotcha. Jon, was Bill hard to manage?   [0:01:51] Jon Hyman: No, he actually was really good. I did try to save him from the despair of a couple of those different projects, but Bill was like, "I can do it, just give it to me," and he then quickly outgrew my team onto his own team and started running product for Greenfield Development that we had at Bridgewater, while I stuck with what we called at the time sustained engineering, which was just managing the 80 plus technology assets that our department had managed.   [0:02:19] Bill Magnuson: Yeah. So fast forward about a year and a half and Jon starts to get a wandering eye a little bit and decides early on in 2011 that he's going to leave and strike out.   [0:02:32] Jon Hyman: Yeah. Basically at the point for me, I had been programming since I was young, programmed all through high school and college. That was how I paid for my tuition and beer and pizza money and there was a lot of good creativity in that. And at Bridgewater I essentially felt that I was both far away from what I'll call is, like a win, I wanted to just kind of celebrate the success of something. There was a huge financial institution, I didn't have any delusions of grandeur that as a 25-year old kid I would impact their bottom line, but I wanted to be able to just celebrate a win with the team. Didn't think I was getting that. And at the same time, I felt that the new tech world was evolving. We had the cloud starting to come out mobile and was explosive. I actually was one of those people who left work in the middle of the day to go stand in line to get the first Android phone that Sprint ever carried, which was really fun. So, I was really excited about it and I thought that I was not going to learn those technologies at Bridgewater. I wasn't doing something that was creative. And so, at that point I just decided that I wanted to either start some kind of tech company or join a small tech company and just be a little bit closer to the product itself.   [0:03:45] Bill Magnuson: At that point I had been at Bridgewater for less than a year. And prior to Bridgewater I was actually at Google and I was a fortunate enough to be able to do this hybrid thing where I got my master's degree and continued working on working for Google at the same time. And the work that I was doing at Google was with the Android team and it was right as Android was launching. And so I had been exposed to mobile in its earliest innings and just had enormous conviction that it was going to fundamentally change the world. And so, Jon left and I had only been there for 10 or 11 months at the time, which was a little bit early to be making a jump, especially on my first real job after getting fully out of school and leaving grad school. But we kept in touch and Jon started working on some really cool stuff working with cool teams, just kind of exploring out in the New York City tech area. And fast forward a couple months later and Jon gives me a call and, I think Wednesday before the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, he had had a partner that he was supposed to be doing the programming competition with that had to cancel at the last minute. And he was like, "Hey, what are you doing this weekend?" I was like, "I'm going up to Vermont with my girlfriend. We've got this really romantic weekend planned." And he was like, "You want to cancel all those plans and do a programming competition with me in the city?" And I was like, "Of course." And so-   [0:05:06] Jon Hyman: I still have that draw.   [0:05:07] PJ: Really?   [0:05:08] Jon Hyman: I can still cause people to quit, cancel their plans.   [0:05:10] PJ: Bag that. What did you say? What did you get? What were your words to convince him to bag it?   [0:05:15] Jon Hyman: "Bill, we're going to be working on this together." Glory.   [0:05:18] Bill Magnuson: ... Yeah. And so the program that we built was called [Gilty] . I think it was perfect for the TechCrunch Disrupt audience, because it was a little bit subversive. It was a little bit mischievous. Gilt was very much an ascendant brand at the time. These flash sales were really exciting. And what it did was it took advantage of the fact that when a flash sale sold out on Gilt, it would not be sold out for everyone who would actually stay in members' carts. Because when you purchase something you had 10 minutes while it sat in the cart, to decide whether or not you were going to complete the transaction or not. So we built an ability for items that were placed in your car to get registered as auctions. And then if you came to the site and it was already in members' carts so you could actually bid on the items that were in people's carts. So there's a lot of consumer surplus there and you know, to be able to arbitrage that risk-free was pretty cool. And so we built this browser plugin that built an auction system on top of it. You could also imagine this had something like OpenTable. You go and there's no restaurant reservations left tonight but you've got a couple of them are up for bid and you'd be like, "Ah, I'd pay 15 bucks for that eight o'clock table time." And you can do that out of band. OpenTable would, of course, never sell you that. But imagine a third party plugin that could.   [0:06:27] PJ: Wow.   [0:06:28] Bill Magnuson: And so that was the project that we did and we ended up winning top honors for that at the Disrupt Hackathon. We actually ended up meeting an investor in a crosswalk as we were walking to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon to present, a couple of days later. And so we're walking to the conference and Jon was on the phone and I just started talking to the guy next to us in the crosswalk. He was an investor and he's actually the CEO of a company called Rubrik now, a guy named Bipul Sinha, and he spotted me on stage when we presented later that day and sent us an email that was like, "Hey, I don't know if you remember, I met you in a crosswalk. I know this guy living down in Texas who's thinking about starting something in the mobile space. I think you guys should connect and talk." And I got a hundred emails that looked exactly like that over the course of that week because Jon and I had had a video interview on TechCrunch and it was a hot tech blog at the time. And I just filed it away and went back to my job.   [0:07:24] Jon Hyman: I didn't even know this whole ordeal had happened. I was actually on the phone, didn't even know Bill had a conversation and wasn't on that email that Bill later got. But, Bill came over for dinner and, then we were just talking about what had been going on in the last couple of weeks. And I was sharing the exciting things I was talking to people about in New York. And I asked him if he had seen any interesting opportunities and he was like, "No, not really." And I was like, well you should go through your inbox and see if there's anything that looks really good. And, what about the crosswalk investor in Texas? Was that just the first of many and that was it?   [0:07:58] Bill Magnuson: I didn't have great work-life balance at the time, and I would include in the life part of life-balance, checking my personal email. And so it just kind of went into a big pile of a lot of outreach that we got after, the notoriety that we received from getting written up in tech crunch and such. And I just hadn't transacted on any of them. I just went right back to my day job the next day.   [0:08:20] Jon Hyman: Bill then ends up just shooting me a text or talking to me a few days later, just being like, "Hey, come in to New York City, we're here, we'll get drinks with this guy." And I'm like, "What? What are we doing?" And he's like, "Yeah, I'm going to talk to some guy who wanted to start a company called Appboy. And he was gonna meet us for drinks and just come on." And I didn't really know anything about this. It turned out that Bipul Sinha was, as Bill mentioned, advisor to this guy, Mark [Ramazian 00:08:44], who lived in Houston, Texas. He's a CEO of an oil and gas company and he had created, actually a product called Appboy, which was a live website. And it was mobile app-related, but he wanted to kind of pivot into building an SDK that would help connect mobile app publishers, developers with their consumers and increase engagement, increase discovery and be a little more social with your mobile application.   [0:09:12] PJ: So, what was it doing without that? What was Appboy ...   [0:09:15] Bill Magnuson: There's a funny, unofficial history of Appboy that goes back years before this. There was a social network that he had built for mobile app developers. So every mobile app would have its own landing page and you could have a community of fans around it and the developer would be able to communicate with them. And, funny thing about it is in hindsight it seems a little ridiculous, right, to have a website to be an index for mobile apps and have that be a social network. But that's what appboy.com was. And you can actually go find, the BBC named one of the best sites on the internet. Or, one of the best sites, excuse me, on the worldwide web back in 2010 or something. Which doesn't ... It's an interesting choice by the BBC, but we always hawk that as our own press in the early days.   [0:09:56] PJ: Oh yeah.   [0:09:56] Bill Magnuson: But, he had shut that down, because it was a side project that he had been working on while running the oil and natural gas company, and was ready to take another look at it. And, I had all this excitement about mobile from my time at Google and my time being a part of it. We all were at this stage in our life where we wanted to go and strike out and do something. And so, I remember reading a lot of things afterward that were, when you find your co-founder, when you decide that you're going to start a company together, it's a lot like a marriage. You got to make sure that you vet people heavily and you need to date beforehand and you everything else. And, I had a phone call, actually the first phone call I had with Mark, I forgot about it. It was hard to access your personal calendar, your personal email while at Bridgewater. So I just got a phone call from him and while I was driving home from work and I literally turned it on speaker phone and was holding my phone against the steering wheel while I was driving home because I didn't have a headset with me in the car or what have you. And that was the first call. And then we exchanged a few emails and we had dinner in New York one night, dinner and drinks. And we all just decided to quit our jobs and move to New York and start up Appboy.   [0:11:02] PJ: How old were you guys at this point when you have that dinner?   [0:11:05] Bill Magnuson: I was 23.   [0:11:07] Jon Hyman: I was 25.   [0:11:09] PJ: Wow.   [0:11:09] Bill Magnuson: I think Mark was 28-ish. So yeah, we definitely didn't follow that advice of heavily vetting each other. But, we connected really well. We were all excited about working in the same space. We all saw, I think the massive potential in the mobile ecosystem that wasn't really being realized. There were a lot of apps, there was a lot of money going into mobile apps. There was a lot of excitement around it, but no one was really building sustainable businesses in mobile. And similarly, the existing sustainable businesses, the enterprise, had not really figured it out yet. They hadn't figured out how their products and services would evolve and change in response to this new mobile technology coming to the world. But we had strong conviction that massive businesses would be built, that traditional businesses would be disrupted. And so what we wanted to was really take advantage of, what was unique about the capabilities of mobile that's going to change the way that people do business. And so when you really look at that common thread all the way through our product from the very beginning it was, we're in a new world where technology has changed the rules of how humans interact with each other, how they interact with brands, their relationship with technology. It's also given us, as people on the controls, a capability that we didn't have before because we can communicate directly to people. We can do it with massive server infrastructure. We can deliver messages across a lot of different contexts and places that we can really understand people better and then we can communicate with them. And so we just kind of started from there. It was like, all right, if we want to really turn a mobile app into a business and we want to do that by building great customer relationships and a great way to build relationships is to talk to people. Right? And that's the starting point. And I think that we really benefited actually from a kind of ignorance of the broader marketing technology space at the time. Because, mobile apps also didn't have marketing teams in 2011. They were typically just product teams. They were launching into the app stores and the magic of the distribution mechanisms to the app stores allowed them to be successful without real marketing or customer engagement strategies. And so, we built just for that business purpose without a specific set of competitors in mind or without some sort of preexisting capabilities that we benchmarked ourselves against. We really just wanted to generically solve that problem of understanding people as they're interacting with a primarily mobile app experience at the time. But just understanding how they're trying to interact with a product or a service and then communicate with them along the way.   [0:13:31] PJ: So that philosophy, that's been intact pretty much since the beginning. That hasn't shifted much. But what is the first version look like practically when you guys started spinning it up?   [0:13:41] Bill Magnuson: Yeah, so the first version, it had a lot of the messaging types that we have today. So we had a slide-up message, which we would call an in-app message slider today that only came up from the bottom. But that was an ephemeral in-product experience. I call this the Appboy as a proper noun phase of the company, because we had this idea that people would click on something called Appboy, and then it would, within an app, and it would bring up a interface that would be familiar to you in multiple apps that you were using. And that interface would include your user profile. It would include a news feed which was a card stream, we called it a mini blog inside your app. Although nowadays we can just call it a news feed and people know what that means. It had customer support in it and it had app recommendations. And so that was what we today have as the Content Cards feature, which is this kind of persistent card-based messaging that's personalized and delivered to you inside the application. And then we also had email and push that we would deliver. But the email and push was hard-coded at the time to go with you through your journey of using an application. So you would use it the first time and it would be like, "Hey, congrats for using this app for the first time, here's a badge, you're an App Newbie." And then as you would use other sorts of features, we would tell you about things inside the app that could be programmed or we would give you badges for using it. You could recommend it to your friends. I would call it hard-coded as an engineer. It was like a more hard-coded experience, but it was really communicating across all those different channels. It was building up a user profile over time based on the things that the user is doing, and also things that they would tell us in their own user profile. And then utilizing that to personalize the whole experience. So, all those foundational building blocks were there.   [0:15:19] Jon Hyman: Well the user profile actually I think is a fairly novel idea at the time for mobile. Because when we look at app analytics providers back when we were in 2011, it's extremely device-centric. And the fact that we were thinking about user profiles, it was social. You even had friends, you could connect Facebook to it. That was a new idea and that actually really then led up to our benefit of us being able to now have that 360-degree user profile across devices, platforms and channels and online and offline. Because we started with it literally from day one that we were viewing the people who use your product, not the devices that use your product. In fact, the first version of the user segmentation engine was just the user directory. We wanted to show publishers here are the people who downloaded your app this week. Here's everyone who's made a purchase, and actually show the people, not just the device statistics there. And so I think that was a different light and different way of looking at the data then that now you just see, not only is just being so obvious, but that everyone's just driving towards because we're trying to engage people for who they are and have good brand [inaudible] and you can't do that when you just look at device to device.   [0:16:31] PJ: And so as you guys were building this team, what was the first crew?   [0:16:37] Bill Magnuson: So the early crew was primarily engineering, we had to get the product built and out the door. We originally built for IOS only, so the vision was obviously to eventually be across all different platforms, but IOS was kind of the dominant place that brands were starting to make money at the time. Because if you go all the way back to 2011 you also have to remember that things like in-app purchases and digital goods were these scary, crazy things. And people were like, "Why would I ever spend $2 on something that's not real?" And, we kind of evolved with all of those cultural changes over time because it really took apps to coming businesses. But yeah, the early team was primarily engineering. I was actually the CTO when we started and Jon was CIO and it was such a luxury to have two technical co-founders to really get that early product built and get things out the door. And so I, you know, worked on the dashboard and the SDKs and Jon worked on the API's and the back end and the infrastructure and you know, together we, we built out teams to, you know, help increase velocity. And we got that first product out the door as an SDK that would integrate in your app and there'd be a button that you would press either the app boy logo or the lightning bolt logo and it would kind of pull up the user profile at the newsfeed and everything. And, and you know, we didn't do a very good job of building the, the MVP, you know, and kind of being lean about it. We really had a fully featured system when we did that first launch. But I think that that has really benefited us over time because we, we've seen a lot of the architectural, I think mistakes or limitations that exist in a lot of the other people that operate in the space. And I think the fact that we forced ourselves to figure out how to communicate with people in a lot of different ways and we figured out how to understand people as Jon Mentions as humans, not just as devices made that initial version of the product a lot harder, but it meant that our foundation was more flexible and stronger.   [0:18:31] PJ: Did you guys have trouble getting companies to integrate that native SDK early on because maybe it might not have been, you're in their code that probably wasn't very, normal.   [0:18:43] Bill Magnuson: Well actually at the time it was actually pretty common for apps to just have an outrageous number of SDKs, like a dozen or 15 or something, and just kind of smash them all in. And it was definitely the wild west. We now deal with that legacy a little bit in that a lot of the smaller companies at the time, we started to run into this pretty quickly, is that one of those 15 SDKs was not a good citizen in your application. And so then people started to get a little bit nervous about it. But, in the early days it was just, you built apps, and you tossed a whole bunch in and people were willing to really experiment and try things out quite a bit. I think that trying to build any business though, it was easy to get people to sign up and be interested. It was harder to get them to integrate. It was even harder to get them to pay. And so that was a progression that we certainly had to go through. And it took a couple of years, I think, before we had our first real annual enterprise customer.   [0:19:37] Jon Hyman: I think that some of the challenges we also had was just the initial product of being an app inside an app or a social network, was fairly hard to explain and hard for people to understand. Like Bill was just saying that you would tap the Appboy icon or lightning bolt icon and you'd go into Appboy, and I remember we used to demo the application and we'd be like, "So, you're in your app and then you click this button and now you're in Appboy." And people would be like, "What? Now I'm in an app inside an app but, can I white-label this so it's not Appboy and it's just my app?" And I think that was really a hard sell for some companies, but also at the time a lot of the apps that we were talking to, or possible customers, weren't real businesses. They were just people who had a huge number of downloads in the app store. This in 2011, you'd have someone who built a flashlight app and it was one person and they had a tremendous number of downloads. We had a very big early customer, this was probably around 2012 or 2013, that had 40 to 50 million monthly active users. It was one developer who built a photo collage app when you used to be able to stitch together different photos into a collage and put it on Facebook, and he just wouldn't pay for anything because he was like, "I'm just one guy. I'm not running a business. I'm just, I sell these digital frames." And he'd make some money but isn't a brand. And I think that was one of the challenges we were up against was the app store was just so immature that you weren't having people think about the only businesses. Brands were just having something as an app available for people in the download. It wasn't the way they really thought to run their strategy.   [0:21:18] Bill Magnuson: And, we really realized that, I referred to it earlier as the Appboy is a proper noun phase, what we needed to do eventually was, we started to unbundle that feature set so that it could really get integrated into the first-party experience. So, the user profile went into the background and the news feed got integrated into an activity feed or some sort of other updates or what have you into the native experience. Seeing that message was always over the top and it wasn't really problematic from that perspective. And we actually ended up cutting a number of features over time. And one of the things that was a really, I think critical signal on that as Jon mentioned, is we would demo it and people would say, "Oh, can I replace that Appboy logo or that lightning bolt logo with my own?" And it seems like a natural white-labeling request, but if you actually think about the customer experience, you go into the Yelp app as an example, and then there's a Yelp logo in the Yelp app that you're supposed to click on, right? Like that feature request didn't make any sense. And so if you take a step back from that, it's like, "Oh, this person's not asking for something dumb. This is just evidence that what we're trying to offer and the way that they're conceptualizing it doesn't make any sense, writ large. And so, we had to really go back and rethink about how do we integrate into the product experience and how do we take this feature set where the feature set makes sense, but it's just not integrating and in the right way.   [0:22:37] PJ: So people were using Appboy on smartphones. Is that what you're saying?   [0:22:42] Bill Magnuson: Well so, Appboy was like ... So did you ever use OpenFeint back in the day?   [0:22:47] PJ: No.   [0:22:47] Bill Magnuson: Or imagine going into a game and having a gamer profile, right? Where you go into the gamer or profile and then there's, "Here's some news for you and here's some stuff you can edit about your profile."   [0:22:56] PJ: That I understand.   [0:22:57] Bill Magnuson: It was like that. Right? But we wanted to make it generalizable across all different applications. And so that was just something that, at the time, a lot of the way that the app store was developing and the way that a lot of apps we're developing, something like that made sense in 2011 for a lot of those apps and the feature set made sense for businesses. But as apps actually started to develop into businesses, we had to modify that.   [0:23:21] PJ: Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Any early days debacles that you guys had to deal with in the first few years? Like big, big, fire drills that you guys had to run in terms of technical?   [0:23:33] Bill Magnuson: Yeah, there were, we could go through a couple of those. I think one of the things I laugh at the most from our earliest office was that we actually were in office space, that we were squatting in, long story. But we were in the offices of a now bankrupt real estate company. And it was in the Starrett-Lehigh building, which is a big building with a lot of fashion companies in it over in 2011, and there was no reasonable internet into the building. But, this was the early days of WiMAX and we had line of sight to some WiMAX towers. We were like, alright, let's try out WiMAX. And so we got these WiMAX modems. And the modems for early WiMAX, we obviously didn't realize this but, they didn't support both charging them and running them for long periods of time, at the same time. They were built to be high bandwidth, but not to actually be used for the use case we were using it for. So we had it up on a ladder, hanging off of this rope from the top of a ladder-   [0:24:30] PJ: That is not safe.   [0:24:30] Bill Magnuson: ... So that it was pointed directly at the antenna on top of a building somewhere else in Manhattan. And then had a fan running on it with the battery cover off the back because the battery would overheat if you had it running with the charger and running all day. And that was our Internet connection for the office.   [0:24:45] PJ: What a rig.   [0:24:46] Bill Magnuson: Yeah.   [0:24:47] PJ: Holy cow.   [0:24:48] Bill Magnuson: When we moved out of that office, we actually-   [0:24:53] PJ: But you were squatting?   [0:24:54] Bill Magnuson: ... We were squatting. So we were there for five or six months rent-free, beautiful office.   [0:24:59] PJ: But, they knew you were there or somebody knew you were there?   [0:25:01] Jon Hyman: Yes, essentially it was Mark-   [0:25:02] Bill Magnuson: They knew we were there. [crosstalk 00:25:03].   [0:25:03] Jon Hyman: ... Mark's family had essentially acquired this property that they didn't need and the lease was running up in a couple of months and they said that they could give it to us. It was actually this huge 3,500 square foot office that had literal offices, Bill and I each had a 15 by 15-foot office. You could close the door and-   [0:25:23] Bill Magnuson: Two of them had windows and so that was where we set everyone up to work. And then the other two didn't. And those were actually where we set up the air mattresses because Jon and I were living in Connecticut at the time, and it was a lot easier to just sleep at the office. We had extra offices.   [0:25:36] PJ: Oh, been there.   [0:25:37] Bill Magnuson: There was actually one morning where I woke up, one of our employees had gotten there early. It was just the two of us in the office, but I had still been sleeping in the office and he came over and he knocked on the door and he was like, "Hey, they're evacuating the building right now because there's a gas leak." And I was like, "Oh, man." And he's like, "I don't know what the deal is but the alarm's not going off in our space. But I saw the blinking lights out in the hallway and I went out and I found out what was going on." And, I've gone over that in my head before where if he had not been there, I would've just kept sleeping and I would have woke up in this building that had been completely evacuated due to a gas leak and I probably would have just opened my laptop and gone to work without even realizing that anything was amiss.   [0:26:21] Jon Hyman: Yeah, I remember that we got out of there and, Mark, I don't think was in town then.   [0:26:26] Bill Magnuson: Yeah. He hadn't moved up to New York yet. It was the first few weeks.   [0:26:29] Jon Hyman: We had told him what happened and it was just a shock. We also were in that building when an earthquake struck.   [0:26:35] Bill Magnuson: Yeah. Which was the next week. And I remember the whole building evacuated again and everyone was really worried that there had been a gas explosion because it was only one week after the gas leak, and the earthquake evacuated this whole building. And the Starrett-Lehigh building, I think it's the second or third most square footage of any office building in the city because it's an entire massive block on the West Side. And so the whole building evacuated and there were just 10,000 people wandering around on the sidewalks outside the building.   [0:27:02] PJ: Well I'm glad you guys survived that.   [0:27:04] Bill Magnuson: Yeah.   [0:27:04] PJ: That sounded like the biggest debacle to-date.   [0:27:07] Bill Magnuson: I guess. Yeah. We didn't have the product launched at that point yet so that we didn't really have the opportunity for technology debacles. It was really more of a facilities. [crosstalk 00:27:12].   [0:27:15] Jon Hyman: Yeah it was like six weeks in, basically.   [0:27:18] PJ: So what about channel agnosticism? Was that something that was even a thing or a thought back then? Because from what I've heard is, the way that we are built, we're future proofing for multiple channels and things that maybe we can't even conceptualize yet.   [0:27:34] Bill Magnuson: Yeah, well I alluded to this earlier, but this idea that our initial product launch had messaging which was push by its nature. So we had push notifications in email. One of those two is in the context of the product, which is push notifications. The other one is outside and is addressed in a different way. And then we also had messaging which was completely inside the product experience, both ephemeral, which was the slide-up and then persistent, which was the card stream. And so when you look at that, push by it's nature, pull by its nature, ephemeral, persistent in the product experience and out of the product experience, you've basically covered all the dimensions of messaging. And so when we look at new ways of communicating with people across new message channels, either as we develop support for existing ones or as new ones come into play, we've already got an archetype of messaging in the system which looks like that. And that's really important because it means that all of the other features that we've built further up the stack, things around user targeting or content personalization or orchestration across channels, they all were built from the very beginning, taking into account that the way that you communicate with someone could go across any one of these dimensions. And I think that one of the things that you see in a lot of platforms that start out as a single channel or as a single set of channels, is that when they tried to expand into other places, they'll find parts of their feature set that aren't compatible with, for instance, pulling down a personalized stream of messages when it was architected to just send a campaign out to someone. And as a result, when we look at message expansion, we end up with this consistent and predictable experience for customers who are used to all the sophistication further up in the product where you're doing your user targeting or your classification, you're personalizing things, you're orchestrating across channels. Those are all going to work in intuitive ways as we add new channels. And we're going to get the advantage of all of that sophistication that we've built even as we add things that are completely new. And so that I think has both, it's future-proofed us and it's also really helped our customers push their own boundaries. Because I think that a really big part of what caused a lot of messaging to end up siloed inside of companies, a big part of that is a learning curve and a skillset. And, the technology being siloed certainly matters. But when you can use a platform like Braze and you can come on board to it and you can learn how to send push notifications with it and, 90% of that knowledge is transferable to sending email. And then of that you can then transfer that into sending SMS or into delivering messages inside the app. That ends up becoming a really good mechanism for teams rapidly build ROI and spread it across all these different ways of communicating.   [0:30:08] PJ: Well guys, we're almost at time here, but I got to say, and I should've opened with it, happy eighth anniversary of Braze. It's been about eight years. Congratulations to you both.   [0:30:17] Bill Magnuson: Thanks.   [0:30:18] Jon Hyman: Thank you.   [0:30:18] PJ: Huge deal. I just want to know before we close out, what are you most excited about in your ninth year of this company?   [0:30:26] Jon Hyman: For me, I'm really excited about just continued growth in our company, both with our people and the types of businesses that we work with. I'm really excited that Braze is just so plugged into the fabric of the digital world. We engage more than 1.7 billion monthly active users now and we do that for financial apps or lifestyle apps, retail and eCommerce, huge consumer brands. And I'm really excited as we continue to go up that brand chain and work with the best companies in the world. What that's going to mean for our business, but also we have such a tremendous amount of talent here supporting those. The people that work on different teams here, whether you're on the sales side, the engineering side, success, support, marketing, there's so much great dedication and real passion. People who are very sharp, smart, and I'm just excited to continue to grow the company with that kind of caliber of talent.   [0:31:21] Bill Magnuson: The thing that I really like about being a technologist and being at a technology company is being able to solve new problems with new capabilities. And so when I look into our next year, we've got new teams that we've been building out. We've got existing teams that have gotten much larger. We've put a huge amount of investment into new capabilities, whether that's new tools, technology, skills, acumen, partners, whatever it is. Those things all multiply and compound together. And I feel even here in our ninth year, we're still vastly accelerating our capabilities, our execution velocity, the way that we reach out in the market, the impact that we've had. And so when I look forward, it's rapid growth as usual. I think, as we look at the last couple of years, we really hit this inflection point as the problem that we had been really soldiering on, working on for six years really started to become a massive priority for businesses of all kinds. And we've really enjoyed, I think a acceleration and inflection point in our growth, and we're still in the early innings of that. And when we look into the next year, I'm just really excited about what the team's going to accomplish.   [0:32:27] PJ: Guys, this just hasn't been enough time for me. So I'm thinking I got to get you guys back on the podcast in a few months time, and we can maybe tell more of the story. All right?   [0:32:35] Jon Hyman: Sounds good.   [0:32:35] PJ: Jon Hyman, Bill Magnuson, thank you guys so much for coming on, making the time for us. And thank you guys for listening. Take care. [0:32:42]

New challengers in the content streaming space! HBO Max and Disney+ enter the race for video delivery dominance. Listen in to hear VP of Growth, Spencer Burke, and Strategic AE, Patrick Forquer, discuss the lay of the streaming land, offering packages, and the frontrunners.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] Spencer Burke: Have you guys watched ET recently?   [0:00:20] PJ Bruno: Pretty much every Christmas, yeah.   [0:00:22] Spencer Burke: Really?   [0:00:22] PJ Bruno: No.   [0:00:23] Spencer Burke: Oh.   [0:00:24] Patrick Forquer: This is our best content in years.   [0:00:25] PJ Bruno: It's the best yet. Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discussed digest. My two esteemed guests today, close friends and colleagues, once again, Spencer Burke of the [house growth] and Patrick Forquer from the sales org. Gentlemen, welcome back.   [0:00:41] Patrick Forquer: PJ.   [0:00:42] Patrick Forquer: What a pleasure to be with you and Spencer again.   [0:00:46] PJ Bruno: I'm very excited about today. Spencer, good to you. You're looking very tanned.   [0:00:49] Spencer Burke: Thanks, Pat.   [0:00:50] PJ Bruno: Where did you go?   [0:00:51] Spencer Burke: Thanks for having me, PJ.   [0:00:52] PJ Bruno: Yeah, man. Always good to have you back on. You always have insightful big words.   [0:00:55] Patrick Forquer: I just drank some excellent cold brew on tap. I'm fired up.   [0:00:59] PJ Bruno: That's good. Me too. I forgot that you're supposed to dilute it with water.   [0:01:02] Spencer Burke: Yup.   [0:01:03] PJ Bruno: I just do straight-up.   [0:01:03] Patrick Forquer: Yeah.   [0:01:04] Spencer Burke: Wow.   [0:01:04] PJ Bruno: That's right. I'm fired up. My vision is vibrating a little bit, so let's jump in before I can't see. So this episode, we're getting in the streaming wars. We're all aware of how many different companies are trying to capture the apple as far as streaming services. We've got Netflix, which has been around for a long time. There's Hulu. Now we have two big contestants jumping in the ring. First of which, HBO Max joins the growing mob of streaming services, chasing after Netflix. Their parent company AT&T, they unwrapped this direct-to-consumer streaming service this past week. HBO Max will feature 10,000 hours of content from HBO, Warner Brothers, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and other Warner media properties, planning to launch next spring. It's the first major venture to come from AT&T's $104 billion takeover of Time Warner. They're going to have a lot of titles. They're taking Friends off of Netflix, which is pretty huge. I know every once in a while, I'll jump into a few random episodes just because it's chicken soup for the American soul. It truly is. Also, Patrick mentioned to me that some Reese Witherspoon movie is coming to HBO Max too, and you're the Reese Witherspoon fan.   [0:02:21] Patrick Forquer: I am a huge Reese fan. I'm on the board or director of the Reese Witherspoon fan club, a huge supporter of all of her work. Very excited to have that.   [0:02:33] PJ Bruno: Yeah. What's it called?   [0:02:34] Patrick Forquer: It's called The Reese Witherspoon Story.   [0:02:37] PJ Bruno: That's good.   [0:02:38] Spencer Burke: On a serious note, which ... Do we do serious on this?   [0:02:42] PJ Bruno: Yeah, we can slide into the serious.   [0:02:44] Patrick Forquer: Let's try it on for size and see how it feels.   [0:02:46] Spencer Burke: As Netflix loses content, I often feel like I'm on an airplane, a little bit trapped. I'm not really excited about any of my options, but I'm at home on the couch. I want to watch something. Do you guys think Netflix can sustain its edge as it's losing some of this content, Friends and The Office or some of its most streamed shows? When you sit down and put on Netflix, are you really excited about the options? How do you feel about their current content library?   [0:03:14] PJ Bruno: I think their sweet spot as far as ... It all comes back to original content because yes, they were first in the space. They were quick to absorb some of our favorite shows, but as they start to lose some of those tried and tested sitcoms that we love so much and keep going back to, they still continue to put out really, really great "original" content. When I say "original", there's quotes around that because it's not super original. It's just paying people for their content and branding it Netflix, but the original content that's come out of there ... Stranger Things, I just burned through in a day and a half, season three, and I'm ready for season four. They just keep putting out great things.   [0:03:51] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, I think the interesting part if you look at the evolution of Netflix since it really doubled-down on focusing direct-to-the-consumer, evolving from the DVD business back in the day-   [0:04:02] PJ Bruno: They still have that DVD mailing service, though, by the way.   [0:04:04] Patrick Forquer: Do they really?   [0:04:05] Spencer Burke: Do they?   [0:04:05] PJ Bruno: They do. It still exists in case you guys want a mailed DVD.   [0:04:09] Patrick Forquer: Ugh, I would love that.   [0:04:10] PJ Bruno: It's nostalgic.   [0:04:11] Patrick Forquer: But they took all this content from the big linear players, NBC, CBS, etc, before the linear TV folks really knew the gold that they had on their hands. So to see this now retraction of that to say, "Oh, wait ..." They built this tent pole around this really popular chicken soup for the soul type of content, Friends, etc, and are pivoting now to towards the original content. So they built the audience, leveraging all the great content from other folks, and now that those folks are pulling that back, they have critical mass. So I actually see it ... I don't see that as a huge threat to Netflix overall because they're putting out something like 80 to 100 original movies every year. Think about that. Think about that scale.   [0:04:59] Spencer Burke: Half of them are Adam Sandler movies.   [0:05:00] Patrick Forquer: Yeah.   [0:05:00] PJ Bruno: Oh man.   [0:05:02] Spencer Burke: He keeps doing it, though, doesn't he? He's trying his best. He's staying.   [0:05:05] PJ Bruno: He is trying.   [0:05:05] Patrick Forquer: But they're playing a volume game right now. They're putting out a massive amount of content. Only 5% or so needs to hit. As long as they're getting single digit hits out of the massive volume they're putting out, they're going to continue to see subscriber growth. They raised their prices recently. They now have that mass where it doesn't matter that things are going away, as much as it helps those other services. To Netflix, they've already got that.   [0:05:32] PJ Bruno: HBO Max and chill doesn't quite have the same ring to it, I don't think.   [0:05:36] Patrick Forquer: Right. Well, the interesting thing about HBO, though, if you think about the different big players, HBO is obviously one of the big ones out there where they're known for lower volume but extremely high quality content. Game of Thrones, etc. But what'll be interesting to see now is as they scale that ... And their CEO has talked a lot about that, especially since the merger with AT&T. They'll scale that, and the idea is keep the extremely high level of content, and maybe not get to the level that Netflix is getting, but you're getting at a much higher "hit rate" of things that work and things that resonate with the audience, even though the overall volume may be lower than Netflix. It'll be higher than where they are now. There are so many different universes coming together with DC, Turner, etc. I'm excited to see what that looks like and takes shape. The original lineup that they've come out with looks awesome in addition to ... Yeah, you probably know double-digit people that watch Friends every night before bed. So that alone is just like ... It's one of those shows that people just watch and feel better about [inaudible].   [0:06:47] Spencer Burke: With Netflix, it's not just that they need 5% to 10% of the shows to be winners. Their equation is slightly different because their audience is so broad. They're creating really niche content, and in linear TV, niche content takes up a time slot. So the opportunity cost of that is really high. Do I want this show for middle America to take the 7 o'clock time slot, but I know no one in San Francisco is going to watch it? Versus on Netflix, we can ... I don't even remember what that Ashton Kutcher show where they're out on the ranch is called. The Ranch? Is that it?   [0:07:20] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah, I think it is called The Ranch. Sam Elliott.   [0:07:23] Spencer Burke: Yeah, we can release that and Stranger Things and Dark. There's this horror sci-fi thing going on at the same time as this western-type story. So what they're trying to do is create content that really hits different parts of their audience and have winners for each of those segments. I think HBO and Disney have both done the opposite, really high-quality, broad appeal, Game of Thrones. Disney has a huge history of some amazing winners in that category.   [0:07:53] PJ Bruno: Right. Not taking risks is just fully inline with that vision. When you look at the remakes of recent with Aladdin coming back to live action, Lion King ... I'll probably go see that on Friday.   [0:08:04] Patrick Forquer: Definitely.   [0:08:04] Spencer Burke: Ooo, date time?   [0:08:06] Patrick Forquer: I think it's Friday date night.   [0:08:07] PJ Bruno: We do work directly next to a movie theater.   [0:08:10] Spencer Burke: We do. Yeah, just walk next door.   [0:08:12] PJ Bruno: Speaking of Lion King, we might as well move on to our next big one: Disney. Disney+ streaming service. The release date, the price, the shows and movies to expect. So as we know, Disney is betting big on its 2019 streaming service, Disney+, the future home for streaming almost all things Disney. It'll be the hub to watch the big budget Star Wars series, Marvel Cinematic Universe films, all the Pixar movies including the just-released Toy Story 4 sometime next year, and a bunch of original shows and movies based on those franchises and others.   [0:08:49] Spencer Burke: Yeah, so I guess the rivalry with Netflix is heating up.   [0:08:52] Patrick Forquer: What's interesting about the Disney+ product to me is first of all, I'm really excited about the original content they have coming out on Pixar and in the Star Wars universe and the Marvel Universe. Again, they're pulling all that Marvel content off of Netflix, for instance. So they have what HBO has, which is this blend of the tent pole original content that's very high quality, and they have a history of putting out great content, but also having the older Disney shows and older Disney movies to pull you in. But the third pillar that they have that I think is unique to Disney is parks. So what they have ... Spencer actually sent me an article on this a month or so ago, but what they have is they build these universes like Marvel, Star Wars, Nat Geo, etc. People get really into those ecosystem plays, but then they're also drawn to then go visit those types of experiences in real life. Spencer and I were at Disneyworld last year, and I can tell you business is booming. If you look at the-   [0:09:58] Spencer Burke: It's amazing.   [0:09:59] Patrick Forquer: It's amazing. It's amazing what they're able to do in real life at the parks, and then you look at their earnings reports and they are crushing the margins on that.   [0:10:07] PJ Bruno: Have you guys been to a park recently? Have you seen-   [0:10:10] Spencer Burke: Last year. We'll be back.   [0:10:11] Patrick Forquer: We're going back. Yes.   [0:10:12] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. Did you get to see some of these experiences?   [0:10:16] Spencer Burke: Disney is incredible. The films, absolutely, but in the parks, they've thought through every detail down to ... The bars in the hotel are experiences. There's just really nowhere like that where you get the thrill of an amusement park combined with such a thoughtful experience. Everyone who's there, the cast members as they call them, is really engaged as a character in that experience. It's amazing.   [0:10:50] Patrick Forquer: If you look at the price point for all of those top end services that we're discussing here, HBO, Netflix are going to be comparable in the $12 to $20 range depending on where they land. But Disney's is much lower because as they build these fanbases on the streaming service, that then points them to the in-park experience where they make up the difference in how much lower they are than the other services by pushing people to their other experiences that are live. That's where they make a ton of money.   [0:11:26] PJ Bruno: I haven't been to a park in maybe 15 years. I think it's time.   [0:11:28] Patrick Forquer: PJ, you would love it. Let me tell you.   [0:11:31] Spencer Burke: I think that's an interesting thing about this space, though, because even ... PJ, you opened it up, the streaming war. I think people look at music streaming. All right, there's Spotify. There's Apple Music, and it's zero-sum. There has to be a winner, and everything is a trade-off. In the music space, the catalog of tracks that are on each platform is really similar. They're all licensing the music from the major labels. Spotify, Apple Music, largely going to be the same except for some of the curation that they can do. Netflix was the first mover, really, in the streaming space, especially at scale. So they at first bundled everything together. It looked a lot like your cable package. It looked a lot like Spotify might. Now that's coming undone as these other content creators are creating their own platforms and their own services. I think to have Disney really invest in that and to have consistent access to some of these titles where previously on Netflix, you'd lose it season to season, things like that, I'm super excited about that. I probably will end up spending more. Let's say you're a parent and you're looking at Disney+. You already have Hulu. You have Netflix. It's a no-brainer to add to your catalog.   [0:12:50] PJ Bruno: All right. Well, let's just jump in to taking a look at best video streaming services of 2019. This is a top three from PC Mag. We'll see what they say, and I'm interested to hear your favorites too, gentlemen. We'll get into that in one second. Number one topping the charts is the front-runner, Netflix, at $8.99 a month as you know. It's been around a long time. Impressive catalog. Shows like Altered Carbon, Black Mirror. Bojack Horseman, hilarious. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I also watch. The Crown, Lost in Space, Mindhunters, Narcos, Orange Is the New Black, Santa Clarita Diet, and Stranger Things. Another cool thing about Netflix: what they do as far as video quality alongside Amazon Prime video, is they allow 4K streaming and it supports offline downloads should you be traveling and want to be able to watch a film on a flight. Coming in at number two, YouTube for $49.99 a month. I was going to say that is a high price point for me. That is too rich for my blood, but one thing I will say that does interest me is they offer that excellent selection of live sports, including other cable networks, ABC, AMC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, FX, and NBC. Also, they have unlimited cloud DVR storage. Number three, Hulu. Good one. $5.99 a month or $44.99 for Hulu plus live TV, just undercutting YouTube there. Yeah, Hulu impresses with its best all-in-one options for cord-cutters ... I love that term ... Given its diverse set of streaming options. In addition to the strong library of classic shows, it also has a good selection of movies, live TV options, more than 60 channels of news, sports, and entertainment programming. Humans in the room, what do you guys have as far as apps on tap? What are your top things that you watch?   [0:14:47] Patrick Forquer: In our house, Netflix, HBO, and then Hulu is a distant third, I'd say. I think of the ones on this list ... I don't agree with this list, but of the ones on this list, I think Hulu is the one that will change the most over the next 12 to 24 months. Disney basically, through the acquisition of Fox and buying out the other additional investors, are taking control of Hulu. The market guesstimate at this point is that ESPN will be their home for sports, Disney+ is going to be their home for original content and children-focused entertainment, and then Hulu is going to be more the "adult", more comparable to an Amazon originals or Netflix originals for adult shows.   [0:15:33] PJ Bruno: Where do you watch your sports?   [0:15:35] Patrick Forquer: We have Verizon cable and Internet package.   [0:15:40] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:15:40] Patrick Forquer: But it's this-   [0:15:41] Spencer Burke: So you haven't cut the cord yet.   [0:15:42] Patrick Forquer: Well, so I cut the cord, and then I uncut the cord because the streaming got a little untenable where I couldn't [inaudible] the various games I wanted to watch. Verizon, AT&T, it's an interesting thing. They figured out that people are cutting the cord, so then they made it so you couldn't buy just cable. Buying cable plus sports channels basically is what we have. We have the sports package. We get ESPN and all the sports channels so that we can watch football, basketball, etc. They figured it out a couple years ago, so their bundle changed. Then I got back into it because it didn't make sense to do just cable, for instance.   [0:16:24] Spencer Burke: That's the nice thing about YouTube TV. I did a trial of it last week during Wimbledon. You can watch live sports. You can watch live TV. So it fills that gap for cord cutters who still want to watch sports or who want to watch some stuff live. For me, Hulu had filled that gap a little bit since it was a partnership across a lot of the traditional broadcast companies, but now Hulu fits in this different spot where for me, the ranking is similar. I subscribe to some of the same services. I just don't watch Hulu quite as often.   [0:17:01] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, and they're going to lose ... A lot of their popular content is the NBC content, which they're going to lose when NBC launches their thing. So it'll be interesting to see how they backfill that because that's what we, frankly, use it for is watching the shows on NBC that we miss and essentially using it as a DVR-type service.   [0:17:19] Spencer Burke: Same. Same.   [0:17:21] Patrick Forquer: Yeah. I don't-   [0:17:22] PJ Bruno: Like the Bachelorette?   [0:17:24] Patrick Forquer: Yeah.   [0:17:25] Spencer Burke: Like The Good Place.   [0:17:26] Patrick Forquer: The Good Place. Jimmy Fallon.   [0:17:29] Spencer Burke: Oh, you watch Fallon? Ugh.   [0:17:32] Patrick Forquer: Seth Meyers.   [0:17:32] PJ Bruno: He's not a client, right?   [0:17:35] Patrick Forquer: Jimmy Fallon. Great guy. I'm hanging out with him this weekend.   [0:17:37] PJ Bruno: Your apps, Spence. Your top.   [0:17:40] Spencer Burke: Same as Pat. I've been getting into Amazon Prime for the movie selection just because it feels very broad but also really random titles that I'm not seeing anywhere else.   [0:17:50] PJ Bruno: What are some examples?   [0:17:52] Spencer Burke: Teen Wolf.   [0:17:54] Patrick Forquer: It's pretty specific.   [0:17:56] Spencer Burke: Dune. There's some really nerdy stuff that I like that's in the realm of either-   [0:18:01] Patrick Forquer: Which Dune movie?   [0:18:03] Spencer Burke: The original. Is there a new one? The guy from Twin Peaks.   [0:18:08] Patrick Forquer: Twin Peaks.   [0:18:09] Spencer Burke: Oh, classic.   [0:18:10] Patrick Forquer: Remember? Then they brought it back in 2017.   [0:18:10] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I've never watched it.   [0:18:10] Patrick Forquer: So PJ, what would be your ranking of the apps?   [0:18:16] PJ Bruno: Oh, by use, I would probably say Netflix and HBO have to be right there at the top just because I think half of my watching is documentary. From what I've seen, they have some of the best catalogs.   [0:18:28] Spencer Burke: What kind of docs?   [0:18:32] PJ Bruno: I'm obsessed with cult documentaries. I've seen every cult documentary that exists.   [0:18:38] Spencer Burke: Doing some research?   [0:18:40] Patrick Forquer: PJ is going to be an up and coming-   [0:18:42] PJ Bruno: You've noticed I'm charismatic, right? I'm not letting this go to waste. No, there's the Wild, Wild Country, which was very popular on Netflix, but then there's also my favorite one called The Source Family. Super, super interesting. I'll just give you the boilerplate in 30 seconds. So this guy, he was dubbed the world's strongest boy at age 12 in the 40s or something like that, and then fought in the war. He was a sniper and had 14 registered kills. Moves to Southern California and opens up a chain of health restaurants, and this was before healthy eating was actually a thing. He kicked it off in Southern California. At this point, he's in his mid-50s, and this group of mid-twenty-somethings just rally around him because he loves yoga. He loves eating healthy. He loves free love. So all of a sudden, he has this group of people they call the Aquarians. It's 12 twenty-somethings and this 50-some year old guy is leading them. Of course, in every single documentary, series, or film, it's like they worship this person, this person starts to think they're God, and then all hell breaks loose, basically. But that's the formula for pretty much every single one.   [0:19:59] Spencer Burke: I'm speechless, PJ. That was amazing.   [0:20:01] PJ Bruno: Oh, there's plenty more.   [0:20:02] Patrick Forquer: I regret asking. We'll cut that.   [0:20:07] PJ Bruno: With Amazon, we have that as well through our Prime membership. That's the interesting part about it is that-   [0:20:12] Spencer Burke: You ever thought about canceling your Prime?   [0:20:15] PJ Bruno: Well, here's a question, Spencer. You're married. Do you guys have one Prime account or two Prime accounts?   [0:20:21] Spencer Burke: One, of course.   [0:20:22] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:20:25] Patrick Forquer: Did that foil your follow-up question?   [0:20:28] PJ Bruno: Same.   [0:20:31] Patrick Forquer: You thought you were going to fool him.   [0:20:32] PJ Bruno: No, I just-   [0:20:32] Spencer Burke: Oh, you simple man.   [0:20:33] PJ Bruno: We haven't consolidated yet. So that's stupid. Also, you're going to see that Apple is coming out with a TV product. Amazon already has Prime Video, which is out. We're going to see a bunch of other tech players get into the space as well. Over the next two years, I think we'll see a glut of new entrants, and then over a five year period, we'll see who's going to win out because it's not going to make sense to invest the type of money that Netflix and HBO, etc, are investing in this if you're not going to come full-on because people are coming at this with a lot of money, a lot of attention, and a lot of great content. If you're not up to execute at a really high level across every aspect of the business, it's not going to make sense.   [0:21:18] Spencer Burke: And potentially build a theme park.   [0:21:20] PJ Bruno: Yeah, you also-   [0:21:20] Patrick Forquer: Oh man, what a differentiator that is.   [0:21:22] PJ Bruno: You should build a theme park.   [0:21:22] Spencer Burke: A Stranger Things theme park?   [0:21:25] Patrick Forquer: Oh my God.   [0:21:27] Spencer Burke: He'll love it.   [0:21:27] PJ Bruno: [crosstalk].   [0:21:28] Patrick Forquer: Oh wow. Perfect.   [0:21:29] Spencer Burke: That's exciting.   [0:21:30] PJ Bruno: The last question that I have for all of these services is as the smart home evolves, as Amazon and Apple are building more and more smart home products, the cable companies own the pipes. But if you're Apple and you own the TV of the future, or Microsoft or whoever, then similar to the app store and all of the stuff that we see on our phones, you're going to prebake all of your original content into the device, which is the unspoken thing because we're not really there yet from a smart home perspective. The quality of the screens, etc, isn't there from those products. So as a Amazon home device, even Facebook, etc, as they-   [0:22:08] Spencer Burke: Self-driving cars.   [0:22:08] PJ Bruno: Self-driving.   [0:22:09] Spencer Burke: Guys, as we wrap up, I'd like a prediction from you. Old Town Road. Is it going to continue to be number one? Is it going to hit 17 weeks? Break the record?   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: I think that it will. I care very medium for that song. I'm just so impartial. I'm like, "It's all right." But I think it probably will continue.   [0:22:32] Spencer Burke: Do you think you could do a better Old Town Road?   [0:22:34] PJ Bruno: Like take the song and cover it?   [0:22:36] Spencer Burke: No, like-   [0:22:37] PJ Bruno: Write a song.   [0:22:38] Spencer Burke: Yeah.   [0:22:39] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I think so. I think if I have our BI team's bandwidth for a week, it's all about doing some research. All right, it's this cadence. All right, all the hits are in this key. Here are some top words that we hear from most popular songs. Systematically, with this company, we could create hit after hit after hit.   [0:22:56] Patrick Forquer: I do think that was some of the most clever marketing of the year.   [0:22:59] Spencer Burke: To put a hip-hop song on the country charts? It worked, obviously.   [0:23:04] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:23:05] Patrick Forquer: I love the song. Lil Nas is [inaudible] great Twitter follower.   [0:23:07] Spencer Burke: He's your follower?   [0:23:10] PJ Bruno: He follows you?   [0:23:12] Patrick Forquer: He's a huge fan of mine. No, sorry. Great Twitter follow. Yeah, definitely. The Internet is going crazy. Every time he puts out a remix, it just continues to stay [up].   [0:23:22] Spencer Burke: Mariah Carey might be the next one.   [0:23:23] Patrick Forquer: Mariah Carey.   [0:23:24] Spencer Burke: I think people are trying to be really clever and use new platforms. This is getting totally off our topic, but it's related to music streaming, and actually streaming on YouTube as well.   [0:23:35] Patrick Forquer: TikTok.   [0:23:35] Spencer Burke: TikTok, yeah. I think the two really exciting and cool things and clever things about what they did ... First, if you're a hip-hop artist, breaking into the hip-hop charts is really hard. There's just a lot going on there. A lot of people are trying to do that. A lot of things sound pretty similar. Country, however, way easier to disrupt. So from a marketing perspective ... And this happens in the App Store too. People look at which categories and try to figure out what's the best category for me to rise through the rankings. So just being super clever about doing that, then it happened to get him all of this press because they kicked it off the country charts. That's when Billy Ray came in. Some really brilliant marketing there. Then using social media, including emerging platforms like TikTok, to help build a following, he's done that in a way that no other modern artist has to this level.   [0:24:27] PJ Bruno: HBO and Disney could take a note, I guess, from the kid.   [0:24:30] Patrick Forquer: Or PJ Bruno.   [0:24:32] PJ Bruno: We'll see.   [0:24:32] Patrick Forquer: We'll have to put you out there, PJ.   [0:24:33] PJ Bruno: That's about all the time we have for today, gents. I'd like to thank Spencer Burke and Patrick Forquer for being here with me. Thanks, guys.   [0:24:41] Spencer Burke: Thanks, PJ.   [0:24:41] Patrick Forquer: Thanks for having us.   [0:24:42] PJ Bruno: And thank you for stopping by. Take care. [0:24:45]

How can you leverage new tech to ride the personalization wave into a best-in-class swell of engagement? Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Jaz "Personalization Queen" Noble join me to discuss the future of personalization and how to make it work at scale.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hi again and welcome back to Brace for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest and today I have two very, very esteemed colleagues with me both from the Success Org to my right Taylor Veronica Gibb and to my left Jaz Victoria Noble. It's good to have you guys here with me.   [0:00:37] Taylor: Well it's great to have you here as well. PJ, the Victor Jay-   [0:00:44] Jasmine: Let's give him a V, yeah.   [0:00:45] Taylor: Maybe a V, to fit in here.   [0:00:45] PJ: You guys missed it, we opened with talking about the origin story of both these lovely women have V middle names and so we were just kind of like hearing a little bit about their ancestry.   [0:00:54] Taylor: Absolutely. As we start every podcast with deep personal questions to the guests in the room really gets those creative juices flowing.   [0:01:02] PJ: Exactly. Tries to get us in the zone.   [0:01:04] Jasmine: I'm real excited to be here, you guys.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yes, Jaz is back. She was on our very first podcast, which was merely a hackday project about six months ago and now finally we have her back for another one.   [0:01:17] Jasmine: I'm micced up. I have headphones. It's official.   [0:01:19] Taylor: Much more official.   [0:01:21] PJ: It's official.   [0:01:21] Taylor: If I remember correctly, the first podcast, everyone was kind of talking very close to PJ's laptop.   [0:01:26] Jasmine: Yes.   [0:01:28] PJ: No headphones. Didn't know what we were doing.   [0:01:30] Taylor: Nope.   [0:01:30] PJ: Picking up a lot of ambient noise. We've gotten a little bit better and it's good to be here.   [0:01:34] Jasmine: Hilarious, though. I was very funny in that.   [0:01:36] Taylor: Hilarious. That's a great one.   [0:01:37] PJ: You were very funny in that one.   [0:01:38] Jasmine: Yeah.   [0:01:38] Taylor: I think we need to release that someday. Like a little bonus track.   [0:01:42] PJ: For all you listeners out there. Our listeners will receive a special Easter egg treat of the hackday first ever podcast.   [0:01:49] Taylor: For those of you who pledge a certain amount of money we'll be sending to you with a set of Ginsu knives.   [0:01:56] PJ: Absolutely. Well, you know we're a big family.   [0:01:58] Jasmine: Make those checks out to Jasmine Victoria Noble.   [0:02:01] PJ: It has to be in full. It's the only way they'll pay it out.   [0:02:03] Jasmine: Get the V.   [0:02:04] PJ: Well, we're fresh off a 4th of July break. Hope you guys had a lovely time. Go America, Women's national team winning the World Cup. A lot of cool things have happened, but today point break personalization. I mean, I'm thinking of the movie obviously because I loved it and not only that, this week is the 28th anniversary of when Point Break was released.   [0:02:26] Taylor: Oh my God.   [0:02:27] Jasmine: Oh really.   [0:02:27] PJ: It is.   [0:02:27] Taylor: Point Break could rent a car. Point Break, you know is getting settled in the world, like Point Break is-   [0:02:33] Jasmine: Finally making some money.   [0:02:35] Taylor: ... 28, yeah, 28 years old is a good time to be around. But I was actually just asking PJ before we got on the air here. I'm like, I love Point Break. I love personalization. What does Johnny Utah have to do with Braze and personalization here?   [0:02:50] PJ: I'm so glad you asked. So really we're thinking the movie fantastic, but we're thinking more about the concept of point break and what point break is, it means the wave, it gives you enough time to spend the most possible time on the board standing up. So a point break is what surfers really look for because it gives you the perfect ride, and that's what we're talking about. Personalization being the perfect method because as you move forward with your marketing initiatives, there's going to be more and more competition. People get overloaded in their inboxes every day. How can you stand out amidst the crowd and make your message heard? Personalization is the number one way and it doesn't have to be perfect today. It doesn't even have to be perfect next week, but a more perfect campaign will help you stand out amidst the crowd and call out your users by name and let them know that you know them.   [0:03:41] Taylor: I'm glad you cleared that up. I actually came in a president mask today ready to rob a bank with my surfboard. For those of you-   [0:03:49] PJ: Are you Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter?   [0:03:50] Taylor: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter.   [0:03:53] PJ: And if you haven't seen Point Break for the love of God, please go see it. We won't really talk any more about Point Break during this podcast. It was just kind of-   [0:04:01] Taylor: That's a you thing.   [0:04:02] PJ: But yeah, I mean what the first thing and last thing that I'll say about Point Break is it was really lauded for the relationship between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. This like, you know, bros for life. It was a heterosexual chemistry that could only have been created during that time, if it was accompanied by guns and waves and all these manly things. It's like through that atmosphere, it's okay to show a nice heterosexual close, intimacy between two men.   [0:04:32] Taylor: The origin of the bromance is what I'm hearing. All right.   [0:04:37] PJ: Yeah, jeez.   [0:04:37] Taylor: All right, well I think we've got to spin off podcast at the ready.   [0:04:40] PJ: I think we do.   [0:04:40] Taylor: But let's talk a little bit now about personalization.   [0:04:44] PJ: Actual personalization. When we say personalization, my God, you must've heard it a million times already just in the-   [0:04:50] Jasmine: It should be a drinking game at this point.   [0:04:51] PJ: ... Last five minutes.   [0:04:51] Taylor: Yes.   [0:04:51] PJ: Yeah, exactly. If you're following along at home, you should be wasted. But personalization at Braze, it means being able to email out a huge campaign to all these individual people and within the campaign have texts, call out users by name or reference specific things about those users based on their behavior in app or on the website. The way we use personalization is through a template language called Liquid. And this was created by Shopify and it helps us input things like first name, the very common one that I'm sure you've all seen. Hello Taylor, hope you're having a good day. Here's some deals relevant to you. And those deals can be in a specific category that Taylor has been known to search very often. More complicated examples is like dynamically pulling in content or materials or thumbnails based on information that they're collecting about how you interact with the brand. Do you guys have any examples of really smart personalization that you've seen? You know, being in the Success Org, these two are in the weeds of campaign creation day in and day out.   [0:05:54] Taylor: We're in the trenches as you mentioned, and it's kind of fun be able to be a part of a lot of our client's planning, about getting strategic about the personalization that they use. I'll probably bring up a couple examples as the podcast goes on, but off of the top of my head, I work with a dating app and they started using personalization with Braze using Liquid and connected content. By the way, shameless plug, go check out the lab course on this, if you guys are interested in learning more about these things. PJ is featured as well. But they use this to essentially customize the version of an email you get based on if you're a man or a woman, based on if you're looking for a man or a woman or maybe none of the above, you'll get a different personalized email for you with different content and different styling. So they're doing a little bit of this kind of micro personalization and getting really down to exactly what you're looking for and it's something that's so simple and seamless. You may not even realize that it's personal to you, but it just feels like you.   [0:06:56] PJ: Jaz, do you have any?   [0:06:57] Jasmine: I definitely do. So we talked about how Liquid allows you to insert dynamic variables. The simple example of the first name, we also touched on how you can pull in dynamic URLs, right, image URLs, things like that. One of my favorite ways to use Liquid is actually what we call conditional logic. So I can start saying within my message, if X equals Y, send this message to my user. If A equals B, send this other message, right? So I can start to build these conditional statements, if you will. And one of my favorite ways to use this is actually with weather. Braze is really flexible in that we can connect to external weather APIs. And quite literally say if it's raining right now, send this email and this is one thing, one of our customers does, is send out an email to say it's raining, why don't you order it. Or it's sunny, so get outside and make that reservation, I should say. So I really appreciate the conditional logic and think weather is a cool example of that.   [0:08:00] Taylor: And Jaz for all of you listening in is actually the queen of connected content here at Braze. Taught me everything I know, but she is your-   [0:08:08] PJ: Is that official?   [0:08:08] Taylor: ... Personalization wizard. She is. She doesn't always wear the tiara, but for special occasions she will dawn the crown and connected content queen.   [0:08:17] PJ: Where's the sash though?   [0:08:19] Taylor: Ooh, next time.   [0:08:20] PJ: Scepter?   [0:08:21] Taylor: Scepter, we'll see. We'll see.   [0:08:23] PJ: Conditional logic, that's all happening in the same campaign. Even in the same like text field. Right?   [0:08:29] Jasmine: Exactly. So quite literally you're putting in the different versions of the copy depending on what variables you have in place. So using that example of weather the conditional Liquid statement in the Liquid logic language would say, if degrees equals below 50 send, "hey, it's cold, grab a coffee." Alternatively, if the weather is higher than 50 degrees, send this generic message that I was planning to send to the user anyway.   [0:08:59] PJ: Cool. That's just a little sample of what you can see as far as personalization in the Braze platform. Conditional logic using Liquid. If you have access to Lab, please check out our Liquid course. Also, there's plenty of free resources on Liquid online, so just do some searching. Now let's jump into some other articles that are going to help us understand a little more about personalization in terms of what the future looks like and how you can do personalization at scale. The following articles were provided to us by McKinsey. McKinsey, thank you so much for your research and all you do. So this first one, let's jump off Tay Tay. What do you got?   [0:09:34] Taylor: Oh, hey there. Well, not only do I have this article, but I went ahead and brought along my crystal ball here cause we're going to be taking a look into the future of personalization. That was a terrible dad joke, but moving on. First-   [0:09:48] PJ: I can add like kind of like...   [0:09:50] Taylor: Like crystal ball.   [0:09:50] PJ: Sound in the background.   [0:09:51] Taylor: Ooh, I love that. All right, well then perfect. Well we'll edit it in the future of personalization. Physical spaces will be digitized. We've seen this a little bit. Jaz, you and I, I think are both Sephora fans, so you may be familiar with this already, but essentially the fact that when you walk into a physical store space, brick and mortar, what you see is going to be personalized to you. Some of the examples pulled out in the article were places where you could try on makeup or clothes just by standing in front of a mirror. In the future it could be that you'll see on screens around the space, places where you can try on clothes just by looking in the mirror, things that recommend a color for you based on your skin tone or things that you like. And I thought this was particularly interesting because I feel like just a few years ago we were talking about the fact that brick and mortar is on its way out, especially with the rise of Amazon. So can you see this as being maybe the resurgence of brick and mortar just by using this idea of personalization?   [0:10:48] PJ: I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the rise of Amazon and all this stuff, it seemed like physical is on the way out. But with all of these things, fad or not, it always feels like there's some sort of pendulum at play, where the pendulum goes to one side as we do more and more online purchasing. I'm not going out of my apartment. I don't need to go try things on. Like I know this brand, I know their sizes. And now I think we're starting to see the pendulum go the other way because physical storefronts are still going to be a part of the business, especially living in New York City, what is it, Sixth Avenue that's just a mecca for storefronts and for a brick and mortar businesses. So I think the secret sauce is being able to capture all that information in the store front and tether it to all these other touch points and this is not my idea or a nuanced perspective on it, this is something we've all been talking about for awhile. So I don't think brick and mortar is on the way out. I think this is a way to bolster or supercharged that brick and mortar experience when you're in front of one of those mirrors and you have that try-on experience probably makes you want to go back again.   [0:11:55] Taylor: How about you, Jaz.   [0:11:56] Jasmine: I actually just recently had an opportunity to visit Amazon HQ and hear from some of their panel of leaders that work there. And one of them was brought on to bring Amazon back into the brick and mortar space. You guys have seen these Amazon stores popping up.   [0:12:11] Taylor: The Four Star Store.   [0:12:13] Jasmine: He admitted, they're not necessarily profitable yet, but the company that really closed down a lot of brick and mortar spaces is now recognizing, realizing the value of bringing these experiences to your point outside of someone's apartment and off of their couch and in physical spaces. I think the challenge that Amazon and other companies who are rethinking about how they approach brick and mortar is in what ways do the digital and the traditional shopping experience play together and how do they play nicely and where does digital enhance. I mean, Taylor you mentioned Sephora, by the way, I just became a rouge member.   [0:12:46] Taylor: Oh, congratulations.   [0:12:47] Jasmine: Which means-   [0:12:48] PJ: What does it mean.   [0:12:48] Jasmine: It means I spent a lot of money at Sephora. But anyway, I was in the Sephora store and online you have the opportunity to kind of, they have some new technologies that we can try on different shades, but one of the hard things as a women is, especially with summer, we're trying to tan right? And now my foundation color has changed because my face color has literally gone several shades darker. Thank you Bahamas. And so I had to go into the store because I trust them to kind of match that. And they have face matching software, like a program where you sit in the chair and they quite literally scan your face and then tell you, okay, here is your color profile and here are the different foundations that match that and they direct me to the place in the store where those are found so I can pick them up, hold them, look at other aspects of marketing. Right. The bottle, is it pretty, right? There's a lot of things that go into that purchase decision, but it started with a digital experience, a technology coming into play to, essentially pull out where I should start.   [0:13:45] Taylor: And you brought something up earlier. Maybe a quick segue into another point that the article made. Talking a little bit about both with Amazon and in your Sephora experience, kind of that end to end personalized experience. And it's interesting to think, I would hope in Sephora, we'll see this some more, it sounds like Amazon's focusing in on it, that your experiences in the store don't end in the store. So if I go in on the store, I try on a certain shade of lipstick, maybe that will follow me and I'll see an ad later or I'll see an in app message that says, you looked really great in this shade of lipstick earlier. Would you like to order, there's a sale. Things like that that make you feel like you're understood and you're seen as a person both in and outside of the store. That's all personalization at work. And one other thing that I wanted to kind of bring up in this article before we transition over to Jaz's article that she looked at, is something I thought was interesting. They pointed out that empathy will scale within personalization. Now at Braze, our favorite besides personalization drink, our other favorite hot button topic is humanization, right? Making it feel like a brand not only knows you, but that they understand you as a person, that they empathize with you. And it sounds like brands again, like Amazon, are starting to think about becoming more human. One thing that was brought up in this article was the fact that they've patented technology. We're in the future. Voice recognition devices. We'll realize if you sound different than usual, so let's say you've got a stuffy nose, you can begin getting deals or outreach for brands of cough drops, for chicken noodle soup recipes, things like that, that it'll know that you're not feeling well. It's interesting and something that I want to hear from you on, first of all, is that creepy or caring?   [0:15:33] PJ: I don't know if it is creepy just because you know what is creepy is when you say something out loud amongst your friends and then you look at your phone and there's an advertisement for something you said audibly, that creeps me out, right?   [0:15:44] Taylor: Oh, big time.   [0:15:45] PJ: But, to introduce this intuitiveness into technology, I think it's definitely going to be considered creepy to some people and it's going to be a learning curve, I think for us. But that is the exact kind of humanization in technology that I want to see more of. That doesn't feel like they've captured something that I've said, or they've captured an action that I've done and it's like, we all know it, right, when you see something in your phone like, oh, I know exactly where this came from.   [0:16:09] Taylor: Right.   [0:16:10] PJ: Either something I said, or something I clicked on. But then when a computer program offers you cough drops because it can hear your voice a bit hoarse, you're going to have a moment of like how, you know. And I think that almost introduces a little bit of magic until the whole relationship with the brand. That's one that I'm really excited for. Jaz hot takes?   [0:16:28] Jasmine: One thing I will share is we were just talking about Sephora, still top of mind, because did I tell you guys, I'm a rouge member.   [0:16:35] PJ: You said rouge, right?   [0:16:36] Jasmine: Oh yeah, rogue, in case I didn't already mention it.   [0:16:39] PJ: That's like red.   [0:16:40] Jasmine: Yeah, red, rogue. So a recent experience I had shopping with them to actually, this is the experience where after I did it, I got the confetti lipsticks that said I made rogue, right? I shopped for several things, I needed a new makeup brush. I needed like setting powder, a few things, right. Sent them all to my house. One did not arrive.   [0:17:03] Taylor: Nightmare.   [0:17:03] Jasmine: And each item is north of $50 so I wasn't going to just let that go. And this is, I think, where companies, we haven't seen a huge shift necessarily is when it comes to customer service, right? So I missed this brush and instead of being able to, like right now with an Amazon app, I know we're talking about Amazon and Sephora quite a bit, but clearly I shop there a lot. With Amazon, if something didn't come in my order, I just like go through this tool where I say, I select options from a list. It didn't arrive, what didn't arrive, it gives me the list of things in the order. I click that. I click the one it wants. Where do you want it shipped? I click my address. I'm never talking with someone, or it doesn't feel like I'm talking with someone. With Sephora, they encouraged me to send an email to a customer service representative and that might never be their real name, but like a Stacey B emailed me back, right. To say that she was so sorry that I had that experience, wanted to make it right, like using words like that and that's where you feel the human piece of that brand as well. Both are good experiences. I think with Amazon it happened instantaneously, within five seconds, within five clicks, I was able to get that piece that they had missed sent to me. With Sephora, I had to talk with someone, but at the end of the day I kind of felt like Sephora was sorry about what happened.   [0:18:15] PJ: That's a really great point. Like when does the initiative bubble up where customer service has to meet the same high standard that our personalization tech does?   [0:18:25] Taylor: Well, and that's where personalization tech can shine, right? Because it makes empathy and it makes humanization scalable so everybody can feel like Stacey B is paying really close attention to them. That knows is exactly what you're talking about. I mean to avoid a bit of a Her scenario if those, if you guys have seen that movie. Maybe there's a point where it goes too far, but I personally really love the fact that when you have a customer support experience, when you have a shopping experience and it feels like they know you, exactly. That's that hyper personalization.   [0:18:59] PJ: Well, until it does go too far. Stacey B, thanks for all you do.   [0:19:03] Taylor: Stacey B this one goes out to you.   [0:19:05] Jasmine: Shout out Stacey, pour one out.   [0:19:07] PJ: Jaz. What do you got from me?   [0:19:09] Jasmine: We've talked a lot today already about the tools that Braze has, right? Which are really just vehicles for providing the personalization. Taylor touched on strategies and why you'd actually want to use some of these tools to put those programs in place, but now we need to talk about a team that's actually going to action on them, right? If a company decides they want to care more about personalization, they want to provide more personalized experiences, how do they do that, particularly if their tech stack isn't in a super fluid place where everyone's playing nice in the sandbox. And one of the ways that McKinsey talked about it and one of their most recent articles called Marketing's Holy Grail, Digital Personalization at Scale really talked about building a war room of people. Because at the end of the day, this is going to be a marketer, this is going to be a data engineer, this is going to be a software engineer that's going to help you bridge these gaps, get the data where it needs to be to ultimately action on things like including first name, including previous shopping behavior. All of the amazing examples that we walked through today would be nowhere without having the data and infrastructure in place. And so that's one of the things that this article touched on and it kind of reminded me of some of my own client experiences working here at Braze, as a CSM, I got a chance to see the types of teams that our customers are bringing together to ultimately action on this. And I would say it's interesting how some are very nimble and small, while others more at maybe enterprise sized corporations are thinking about, no, it's actually doesn't end here. Let's pull in an agency, right? Let's outsource some of this. Let's fill our stack with a bunch of tech partners including a Braze who can help us achieve all of these things. Like creating that right lineup of a team doesn't necessarily have to be someone at their own company. It could be outsourcing some of that talent, bring it in to be able to action on it.   [0:20:56] PJ: And also even with the enterprises, right? They think, you know they have agencies, they got a really souped up tech stack. They're outsourcing a lot. But I think the key here is having that small group of decision makers. So even though you have this monster stack and you have all these different moving pieces, you still have that core group of decision makers that can move quickly. So even though you have this big group and you have all these resources, you have the right people that can flip a switch, shoot out a campaign and do something. Because that, you know, I'm sure we see that right, the bigger the company, the more red tape, the more approvals. So how can you stay nimble as you expand?   [0:21:34] Taylor: Absolutely, and interestingly enough, this kind of very digital idea of this digital marketing personalization takes a lot of humans to make it run and to make it feel human. So maybe the robot uprising is farther off than we thought.   [0:21:48] PJ: Skynet we're looking at you.   [0:21:51] Jasmine: I mentioned kind of pulling together this team of specialists that could be people within your own organization with the ideas. You could also be bringing people outside from agencies, et cetera to for that strategy, right? The core group of people who are deciding how do we actually action on this, provide personalized user experiences. One of the things that you have to think about is what stack do you have in place? What technologies do you have at your fingertips to be able to action on this? And one company that I think did an excellent job at this and I actually had the pleasure of working with closely is Burger King. Fernando, their CMO talks extensively about this in an AdWeek article about how he assembled a stack. He knew that when they wanted to do and roll out this detour campaign that they were going to need someone to be the action layer. That's Braze actually getting these messages out to people. They are going to need someone to do location. That's Radar. They were going to need someone to connect their POS purchasing to user profiles and making sure that brick and mortar restaurant data actually got to a place where they can see the conversions, right, that's mParticle. And then they also have Branch, encouraging people to get those app downloads from an attribution standpoint. There are others obviously who played a piece in this tech stack that allowed detour to happen, but I think it started with Burger King saying, we can't do this alone. We need to assemble the right players who are flexible enough to play nicely with each other to allow that data to come back and forth and ultimately deliver on this user experience, which ended up being people downloading their app, going to a McDonald's, saying they were at McDonald's, and then getting a one cent whopper. How do you deliver on all of that? And that's one of the things that I thought they did a really good job at was actually thinking about rewiring and hard-wiring.   [0:23:37] Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would hope that the great success and the story of working together with this Avengers of a stack that you just mentioned, will kind of help other large enterprise size companies to realize that they may need to take another look at what they've set up over time and do a little bit of reworking. So many of the teams that Jaz and I work with are working with outdated software. Something that was best in class 10 years ago for this personalization to really work seamlessly and to make these great experiences. You need the best in class right at the bat.   [0:24:10] PJ: Right on the money. So take advantage of personalization tools at your fingertips.   [0:24:15] Taylor: That's us.   [0:24:16] PJ: Pay attention to the tech, to the team. Make sure it's the right people that can move nimbly. As far as the tech, always be reworking, always be focusing on the right tools that allow your teams to move faster. And that's about it for Point Break Personalization. Taylor, Jaz, thanks so much for being here.   [0:24:34] Taylor: Hang loose.   [0:24:35] Jasmine: I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you both.   [0:24:37] PJ: And thank you as well for being with us. Take care. [0:24:40]

This week, I was accompanied by Ryan Doyle (Digital-first AE) and Shezeen Ali (Customer Success Manager) to discuss a few companies that try to expand outside the scope of their main product offering to seize up some auxiliary revenue. Facebook is getting into crypto, Salesforce wants a cut of the CDP game, and Sony wants to give you a ride. Stay in your lane!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] P.J. Bruno: Hi, again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. I'm your host, P.J. Bruno, and with me today...two close friends. I have to my left here Shezeen Ali, to my right, Ryan Doyle. Ryan of sales, Shezeen of success. Hello to you both.   [0:00:35] Shezeen Ali: Hello, thanks for having us.   [0:00:37] Ryan Doyle: Great to be here.   [0:00:37] P.J. Bruno: Yeah, thanks for coming on short notice. I just realized I'm going to be away next week, so we need to get into this week and I don't know what brought us about this topic, but this week's topic is, stay in your lane.   [0:00:50] Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.   [0:00:50] P.J. Bruno: And we're going to be discussing different companies that are trying to expand their company operations and revenue streams into, maybe, some things that are more trends, but definitely opportunities.   [0:01:00] Ryan Doyle: Right.   [0:01:00] P.J. Bruno: How you doing, bud?   [0:01:01] Ryan Doyle: I'm doing fantastic. It's a back to back to back day with customer meetings. I'm glad that we got to do some of the stay in your lane content because I haven't even had a chance to digest some of the stuff that's gone down this week.   [0:01:13] P.J. Bruno: Be a good refresher. Shezeen, how we feeling?   [0:01:15] Shezeen Ali: I'm feeling good. You know, it's been a good week. This morning I had some good calls with clients and I feel that...I'm a customer success manager for those of you who don't know, and I feel that it's really fun when I get to put my own experience into my client's questions. This morning, I have to tell you guys, because I just felt so cool, a client asked me...a dating app client, was just asking me some questions. And it was so cool because I got to tell them how I use their app, what I think about the space, what I think about New York City, you know?   [0:01:46] P.J. Bruno: A dating SME.   [0:01:48] Shezeen Ali: Yeah. What I think about New York City dating, which is where they're targeting their customers, and it was just really fun. Guys, I just love my job.   [0:01:58] P.J. Bruno: That's awesome. That's great that you were equipped with the advice, too. As this is the stay in your lane episode, let's jump right into our lane right now and get going. In case you haven't heard yet, Facebook is moving into cryptocurrency. Their subsidiary, Collibra, will offer a digital wallet for the coming Libra Coin. Now, you turned me on to this, Ryan, and as soon as you did I just started digging and learning a ton about it. It's an interesting topic and Facebook moving into something as secure as sharing money, or currency, it's a little scary, actually.   [0:02:33] Ryan Doyle: When they've been so loosey-goosey with our data before.   [0:02:35] P.J. Bruno: Right, exactly.   [0:02:36] Ryan Doyle: And I think we've all seen how this space is also ripe for scamming and really bad things going down where people take the money and run. And what could Facebook do? Given some of the secrecy around cryptocurrency.   [0:02:48] P.J. Bruno: That's what I'm saying. I think they need to repair some trust before this happens. But quickly, let's kind of digest and understand what it is. Obviously, we know the popular cryptocurrency, which is Bitcoin, and the whole idea behind it is it's not run by any sort of government body. And their trying to do the same thing with Libra, but further than that, it's not governed by any one anything. It's governed by all the different data miners. They all need to validate and approve every transaction. The whole point of crypto is it's decentralized. Libra, it seems like, it is centralized in a way. It's not a government body, but with Libra came the Libra Association, which is 28 companies that will partner in governing the currency. The likes of Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Visa, Ebay, PayPal, Stripe, Vodafone and more. And each company has an equal vote when it comes to decision making, but Facebook owns subsidiary Collibra, which will be the app that the sharing will happen through. It's tricky business because, yes, no government body is ruling it but... A large group of corporations, and obviously, they each have a vote and there's checks and balances but there's no sense of protecting the consumer as much as protecting their own hides.   [0:04:05] Ryan Doyle: I would say first and foremost, in the old crypto paradigm you described, it's the miners and the people supporting the transactions that get the earnings of the newly minted Bitcoin, or whatever crypto they're working within. It's not just in this Libra example, something that is governed by a consortium of companies, but they are also going to earn a percentage on every transaction that comes through. So, it's less of Facebook saying, "Hey, we are going to make something great that the whole world and the un-banked can use." And more like, "We're going to start putting out our own currency now, we're going to make some money off of it, and we have the reach to hopefully make it successful." I think that it's a little bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I would prefer Facebook didn't go this route because I'm really scared of them.   [0:04:52] P.J. Bruno: Yup, terrifying.   [0:04:54] Shezeen Ali: I think when I read that some of those partners are governing the currency, like you said, I kind of thought, "Oh, maybe this is okay, because we have some big companies here and they don't want to have their name attached to something that's going to go horribly wrong." But I still think Facebook claiming that they have some sort of process to verify the identity of users...I feel like we need to see that, before we actually trust it.   [0:05:16] P.J. Bruno: Right. Already, House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, called on Facebook on Tuesday to halt development of Libra until legislators have a chance to evaluate the plans, and take action. So they're kind of already getting warning signs, and stop signals from various politicians. It's also been flagged to me that there's other associations that would be concerned with this sort of thing. The whole point was that, with Bitcoin, there's no agency as far as the governance. But now that we have this group that's kind of monitoring the governance, that comes with responsibility. And so, Libra is a permissions-based system, and the validaters are known, and I don't think they're ready for the implications. Because the U.S. Treasury has regulations and there's the know your customer and anti-money laundering laws and money made from currency exchange volatility, these are taxable events. So there's even more implications as far as IRS holding payment processors accountable. It just feels like there's a lot more-   [0:06:17] Shezeen Ali: It's complex.   [0:06:18] P.J. Bruno: Oh man, there's a lot at play. There's a lot of hoops to jump through and, for my call, I hope that it's enough to shut the thing down. Because even if you frame it as this thing that could be better for the world, right? Non-government run currency, the idea...I love it. But you still have to earn back some trust after Cambridge, you know?   [0:06:37] Ryan Doyle: Right, and you see that the House Oversight Committee has already tried to bring Facebook to Capital Hill to have them testify before, and they just did not understand Facebook's business. The senator asked, "How do you make money if you're not charging users?" And Mark Zuckerberg says, "Senator, we run ads." They just don't understand how Facebook makes money. What won't we understand about them once they get this? If they have it their way just one more time, what's going to happen now? In a bubble, it seems cool. Maybe even safe. But even the U.S. Dollar is used to do bad things. What happens when the currency here is out of the consortium's hands and out into the world? Who will use it to do the next bad thing? Even when the money was coming directly to Facebook, they still accepted those Russian ads to influence the 2016 election. Stay in your lane.   [0:07:24] Shezeen Ali: What made Facebook, do you guys think, even want to venture into this avenue?   [0:07:29] P.J. Bruno: They see the opportunity in it, you know? And I think maybe to them it seemed like the cross-hairs of...honestly, opportunity for control but also an opportunity to seemingly give back. The whole idea philosophically, is making governments the bad guys, because they are controlling currency. So I think that's the positioning for it, but still it's not enough.   [0:07:52] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, I would say they're always trying to become a layer of the internet. So they've become a authentication layer for so many sites, they've become an advertising layer...a way to make money and sell space for so many sites. And now they're getting even closer to that money by getting into the financial realm. Think of how much their advertising business could be bolstered if they understood the financial transactions of two billion people, and think of how well their financial business would do-   [0:08:19] P.J. Bruno: Geeze.   [0:08:19] Shezeen Ali: I don't want them to know any of that, please.   [0:08:23] Ryan Doyle: So this is just one layer deeper for them, but a broad, reaching layer.   [0:08:28] Shezeen Ali: Those are good points.   [0:08:28] P.J. Bruno: I don't want them to see all the moisturizers that I purchase on Amazon. They wouldn't have access to that, right?   [0:08:33] Shezeen Ali: I hope not! I was genuinely confused why they went down this avenue so those are both very good points   [0:08:39] P.J. Bruno: And you know what, let's wrap this one up because I feel like we're staying on it awhile. But one thing I will say is a book that Ryan first read and shared with me, The Four, which just kind of talks a little bit about, really, the magnitude of the...for lack of a better word, treason that was involved in what went down with Facebook. I think people don't really understand the gravity of that. And there still has been minimal to...yeah there's been fines but, any other media company in that situation would be shut down immediately.   [0:09:10] Ryan Doyle: There's a certain likeability that protects them at the end of the day, I think.   [0:09:13] Shezeen Ali: Exactly.   [0:09:14] P.J. Bruno: Anyways. So Facebook, please-   [0:09:16] Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.   [0:09:20] P.J. Bruno: All right, next up. Ryan, you want to talk the helm on this one, buddy?   [0:09:23] Ryan Doyle: Salesforce lent its hand to the CDP industry this week. A long time legacy technology who has a history of acquiring and bolting together different technologies has finally announced that it would like to integrate those technologies by having a customer data platform. Customer data platform, for those listening and not familiar, is a way of tagging events, attributes, moving data around in your tech stack to different ends. Like Braze, even, where we could send them engagement data and they could send us customer actions as they occur. It's just a great way to make sure that data flows seamlessly between all systems and Salesforce has finally decided that they would like to do that even though they have preached for so long, "We're helping the next generation of marketing companies. We are enabling real-time marketing." To see this now, after CVPs have already been in a space for so long, it's just like, stay in your lane! What are you doing? You're already so far down this path. What makes you think this is going to work now?   [0:10:28] P.J. Bruno: In a way, it seems like a natural progression. Just because we talk about the Salesforce Frankenstein monster, you have so many pieces to the puzzle, the customer data platform seems like adding some grease to the wheels. Right? Because you're just going to ease the sharing between all those pieces, but you know, that said it is yet another layer that you're stacking across all of this fragmented ecosystem. We should have seen it coming, though, because they acquired Datorama in 2018 and then less then a year later, "Hey, we have a CDP." Do you have a CDP, or did you just purchase one, and slap a sticker on it?   [0:11:05] Ryan Doyle: Hot take.   [0:11:06] Shezeen Ali: Oh.   [0:11:07] Ryan Doyle: It's in service of saying that they are trying to stay next gen by releasing all these new features and now we can enable all these use cases, but to quote Dan Head, who just walked us through our legacy marketing battle card, or how we approach conversations with people who might be of a legacy marketing paradigm, "The architecture is just fundamentally misaligned with the purpose you're trying to solve for." So, in that sense it will never work.   [0:11:35] P.J. Bruno: Was that Dan Head, as played by Tom Hardy from Peaky Blinders?   [0:11:38] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, Alfie Solomons, in the Peaky Blinders, yeah.   [0:11:42] Shezeen Ali: So good.   [0:11:43] P.J. Bruno: Do you know how he closes every deal? He literally just slams the paper in front of...what have you got there-   [0:11:46] Ryan Doyle: Just sign right there.   [0:11:47] P.J. Bruno: Just sign, right there-   [0:11:49] Ryan Doyle: Your name.   [0:11:49] P.J. Bruno: And then I'll own fifty percent of Shelby Company Limited. Oh my god.   [0:11:56] Shezeen Ali: Wow that was great.   [0:11:58] P.J. Bruno: Peaky Blinders shout out. And so, we'll say to that, Salesforce-   [0:12:01] Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.   [0:12:03] P.J. Bruno: Stay in your lane, bro. All right, moving on. Shezeen, what have you got for us?   [0:12:07] Shezeen Ali: Awesome. Sony...which...you all know Sony-   [0:12:12] P.J. Bruno: Oh, we know.   [0:12:15] Shezeen Ali: They have officially launched a taxi hailing app to rival Uber, specifically in Tokyo. When I think of Sony, I think of all their electronics. I think of PlayStation, that's a big one.   [0:12:29] Ryan Doyle: Headphones.   [0:12:29] P.J. Bruno: Yeah, love it. PS4. That's like how me and Ryan became friends.   [0:12:32] Shezeen Ali: Oh, there you go.   [0:12:33] Ryan Doyle: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That's the only place we are still friends.   [0:12:35] Shezeen Ali: So I was pretty confused by this headline, so they actually announced last year that they were planning to do this, and then they have officially kicked off the service in Tokyo. It's called S.Ride. Essentially, what's going to happen is they're trying to rival Uber, and they've claimed that there are 10,000 licensed taxis in Tokyo. Because right now, the way that it works is there's already so many taxis in Tokyo, so Uber has already partnered with these taxi companies. It's there right now, and that's how they get these drivers.   [0:13:07] P.J. Bruno: So you're saying there's like a maximum number of licensed taxi drivers that can exist?   [0:13:11] Shezeen Ali: Right now. Apparently that's what it-   [0:13:13] P.J. Bruno: It's like alcohol licenses in Philadelphia.   [0:13:15] Shezeen Ali: Yes.   [0:13:15] P.J. Bruno: It's like you need to buy one or pass it on.   [0:13:18] Shezeen Ali: Yeah. And I'm not sure of how they could expand that, but Uber's already there and they're already doing it. And there's also JapanTaxi, which... I just went to Tokyo two months ago, and JapanTaxi was what everyone was talking about. That's like the...I guess you could think about it as YellowCab in New York, but most people just use that.   [0:13:39] Ryan Doyle: Is it app-based?   [0:13:40] Shezeen Ali: It is, yep. It used to not be, it used to not be, and then they integrated it into apps. I had a really bad experience with trying to get cars in Tokyo, you know, they have an amazing subway system. People talk about it all the time. It's like New York City on steroids. Definitely one of the more confusing subway systems I've ever ridden. No one it Tokyo speaks English, so as a tourist, which...they get a lot of tourists, some times it's late, it's like midnight. The subways aren't running anymore. Even though they are efficient, they stop running. So that's when I started to be really grateful for New York and our 24 hour subway system. And we were kind of-   [0:14:16] P.J. Bruno: No one speaks English in Tokyo?   [0:14:18] Shezeen Ali: Yes! Plot twist. Plot twist. No one told me.   [0:14:20] P.J. Bruno: I thought everyone would.   [0:14:21] Shezeen Ali: Nope.   [0:14:22] P.J. Bruno: It was like the end of Big Little Lies, I just got knocked on my butt.   [0:14:25] Shezeen Ali: So that was something no one told me before I went and I was pretty humbled by the fact that I cannot speak anything but English, pretty much. And so, using a lot of Google Translate, and also I was with my brother and his girlfriend but we both were like, "You know, we don't want to just stand on the side of the street and wait for a taxi to come," because we didn't see a lot, "so why don't we use Uber?" And so we did, it took a while to arrive and it was the cutest old man just showed up in his taxi. So it was like a fancy taxi, he was wearing a suit...he had to be 80 years old. Didn't speak English. And it was so bad. We got really lost and it was just not a great experience.   [0:15:06] P.J. Bruno: Really?   [0:15:06] Shezeen Ali: And he got super lost. And he was so embarrassed but we couldn't really say, "Are we going to get charged for this?" Because he didn't know what we were saying, he didn't even understand the Google Translate app that we kept showing him with the characters, so it's one of those-   [0:15:18] P.J. Bruno: But he was very cute.   [0:15:19] Shezeen Ali: He was super cute. Japanese people are-   [0:15:21] P.J. Bruno: Yeah, that's what you were paying for.   [0:15:22] Shezeen Ali: They're so respectful. They're so polite. They love tourists. So long story short is, I started to kind of say, "Oh, Uber in Tokyo? This is not ideal."   [0:15:31] Ryan Doyle: But what makes Sony think they have the special sauce to crack this nut?   [0:15:35] Shezeen Ali: That's where I'm kind of in a weird place right now. Where I'm like, "Yeah, Sony. Let's see what you can do." If you think that this is a...You know what? I'm speaking from personal experience. Maybe other people have had good Uber experiences but we...we rode it a couple of times and it was not great. So maybe they can launch a partnership with these taxi companies that will allow for, I don't know, a better app or maybe GPS...the better GPS system for these taxi drivers, because most of them are really old and they don't even have GPS systems. So you're kind just telling them, "Hey" and they're not using their phone when they're driving so-   [0:16:11] P.J. Bruno: Is this the one time that we allow somebody to-   [0:16:14] Ryan Doyle: To switch lanes.   [0:16:15] Shezeen Ali: I think it might be.   [0:16:16] Ryan Doyle: Sony, feel free to skirt? Merge?   [0:16:19] Shezeen Ali: Feel free. So I'm really curious to see what happens and-   [0:16:22] P.J. Bruno: Yeah, Sony it sounds like the lane is relatively open.   [0:16:26] Ryan Doyle: Wide open, yeah.   [0:16:27] Shezeen Ali: You'd think Lyft would do something but apparently they don't have...they've expressed interest in Japan but they haven't officially done anything.   [0:16:36] P.J. Bruno: I hope that means that on the inside of the cars that pick you up, the entertainment system is the bomb.   [0:16:41] Shezeen Ali: That's what-   [0:16:43] P.J. Bruno: That would be so good.   [0:16:44] Shezeen Ali: That would be the best.   [0:16:45] P.J. Bruno: PS4 in the back seats, what is up? I'm like, "You know what? Why don't you take me around a few more times?"   [0:16:49] Shezeen Ali: There we go. PS4.   [0:16:50] P.J. Bruno: I got to finish my game.   [0:16:52] Shezeen Ali: This came full circle. I'm hoping S.Ride can do something, but you know, JapanTaxi is also used widely, I did mention that. So if they can compete with JapanTaxi and Uber...we'll see. We'll see what happens.   [0:17:05] P.J. Bruno: All right, well I'm excited to see. We have one final one and this remains to be seen whether it was legit or a publicity stunt, because of all the back-tracking that happened. So I don't know if you had heard about this but IHOP goes to IHOB. So that's International House of Burgers, and it was to promote some of their new burger specials on the menu. And it received so much hate on Twitter and the internet.   [0:17:33] Shezeen Ali: I love Twitter.   [0:17:34] P.J. Bruno: The internet was disgusted. It literally chewed up International House of Burgers and spit it right back out.   [0:17:40] Ryan Doyle: They just did it with such fanfare. It wasn't like they one day said, "Hey, we're IHOB." They had this pomp and circumstance around releasing it where it's like something big's coming. Like the same type of hype that was built around the Segway when that first came out, and everyone's like, "It's a Segway." And everyone's like, "It's IHOB." They were-   [0:17:59] Shezeen Ali: I did think that the hype was overdone.   [0:18:01] P.J. Bruno: It's a serious Steve Jobs iPhone level hype.   [0:18:04] Ryan Doyle: Well, because of course, you need to...I feel like, for big releases, the hype is hugely important. But you also set yourself up for a huge fall. And that's what they did here.   [0:18:15] P.J. Bruno: This is not just a stay in your lane, this is a what did you expect?   [0:18:18] Shezeen Ali: But I will say, I had never heard this many people talk about IHOP in years. Unless you walk by one in New York City. I had not heard about, not really, it hadn't come up in conversations. So they got me talking, but maybe not in a good way.   [0:18:32] P.J. Bruno: Yeah, it's crazy because IHOP, think about how firmly that is situated in the American zeitgeist, right? IHOP is immediately, you know what it is.   [0:18:43] Ryan Doyle: Everybody's puked there once.   [0:18:44] P.J. Bruno: Everybody's puked there once, everyone's had subpar breakfast. And yet, sometimes you just get a craving to jump into an IHOP and just crush some buttered pancakes.   [0:18:54] Shezeen Ali: There we go.   [0:18:54] P.J. Bruno: But the response from the president of IHOP, Darren Rebelez, he said, "But we want to convey that we are taking our burgers as seriously as our pancakes." He said, "Most of the 1,800 restaurants still go by IHOP." Which means, I guess, and handful of them are going to go by IHOB.   [0:19:14] Shezeen Ali: I want to know which ones are IHOB.   [0:19:16] Ryan Doyle: IHOB. The restaurants for hobbits.   [0:19:19] Shezeen Ali: Now really, this doesn't help. Him saying that they're going to take their burgers as seriously as their pancakes just makes me even more mad. Why?   [0:19:26] Ryan Doyle: Because they don't take their pancakes that seriously.   [0:19:28] Shezeen Ali: Stick to pancakes.   [0:19:30] P.J. Bruno: I'm going to go ahead and say stay in your lane.   [0:19:31] Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.   [0:19:32] Shezeen Ali: Stay in your lane.   [0:19:34] P.J. Bruno: You know what, that's all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us everybody. I'd love to than Shezeen and Ryan for joining me, guys.   [0:19:41] Ryan Doyle: Thank you for having us.   [0:19:42] Shezeen Ali: Thanks P.J.   [0:19:43] P.J. Bruno: And thank you all for joining us as well. Take care. [0:19:46]

Jesse Halpert from our Sales org and Taylor "The Creator" Gibb from Success join me to discuss the recent acquisitions of data visualizations tools Looker (by Google) and Tableau (by Salesforce). How do these products stack up? What does this mean for the martech landscape? Listen in to learn more!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. And this week I am accompanied by two very special guests returning for her third or fourth I think from our success org, Taylor Gibb, welcome.   [0:00:34] Taylor Gibb: Well thank you so much. Happy to be here. I didn't know if you guys knew its National Eat Your Vegetables Day.   [0:00:40] PJ: Oh really?   [0:00:41] Taylor Gibb: So I just assumed I was going to be talking vegetables. Is that not the case today?   [0:00:46] PJ: I think there's always room to fit vegetables-   [0:00:49] Taylor Gibb: Okay.   [0:00:49] PJ: Into the talk track-   [0:00:50] Taylor Gibb: All right.   [0:00:50] PJ: And I think you're good at finding creative ways to segue. So...   [0:00:53] Jesse Halpert: Solid plug.   [0:00:54] PJ: Absolutely. To my left, I have a very good friend Jesse Halpert from our sales org. He's joining us today. Jesse, how are you?   [0:01:03] Jesse Halpert: I'm doing great BJ. Thanks for having me, first time in a long time.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yeah, first, I mean I literally came to him this morning and was like, hey would you be willing to jump in here? And the reason I did that is because today's podcast is all about two companies that got acquired recently, both data visualization companies, Tableau getting acquired by Salesforce, and then also Looker getting acquired by Google. Jesse Halpert previously worked at Tableau. Isn't that right Jesse?   [0:01:28] Jesse Halpert: Sure is.   [0:01:29] PJ: So Jesse's going to be here to be able to give us the inside scoop. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, how they frame the selling of Tableau and maybe how it stacks up against Looker. But yeah, pretty pumped for this one. Me and Taylor had to do a lot of research on data analytics for this.   [0:01:44] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. Boned up big time on my understanding of Tableau as well as Looker, which we use here at Braze. Shameless plug there and I'm a big evangelist for Looker across my clients, but obviously want to hear more about Tableau as well. Both are great tools, much like eating your vegetables. It's certainly not as much fun but very good for your organization to have a great data visualization tool. So always love to learn a little more about that.   [0:02:12] Jesse Halpert: Were you paid off by the vegetable lobby prior to this podcast?   [0:02:15] Taylor Gibb: I actually was under the table. Sesame Street is paying me big time.   [0:02:19] PJ: We're two minutes in and you already had a vegetable comment, so pacing well for the day.   [0:02:24] Taylor Gibb: Brace yourself.   [0:02:27] PJ: All right, cool. Let's jump into this first article. Salesforce buying data visualization company Tableau for 15.7 billion dollars on the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for 2.6 billion. Salesforce announced a big piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization, and more generally tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass. And also, I hear now that they're going to be taking over Tableau's HQ in Seattle as well.   [0:03:00] Jesse Halpert: HQ2!   [0:03:02] PJ: HQ2, which a I guess has been kind of coined by Amazon when they were doing their search in New York for their HQ2. Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool. I mean, I guess the idea is the West Coast is really getting beefed up for tech and we kind of like have New York as this lone capitol of the tech world on the East Coast. Yeah. I'm interested to hear a little bit more. Jesse, when were you there at Tableau?   [0:03:25] Jesse Halpert: I was there for nearly two years and I finished up in March prior to Braze. But you know, worked primarily as an account executive and account manager there.   [0:03:36] Taylor Gibb: Jesse, would you have been swept up in all of this Tableau, you know, purchase excitement had you been there or are you getting a little FOMO right now?   [0:03:44] Jesse Halpert: Definitely a little bit of FOMO when I read it and definitely wish I had held onto more of my shares. But yeah, it's you know, incredibly exciting for, you know, people that have been there for awhile.   [0:03:54] PJ: But Tableau, it has a more of a beefed up product suite than Looker. Is that, is that right?   [0:04:01] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I'd say beefed up in a sense. I think what was always a big value prop that I would communicate at Tableau was the ease of use and you know, like intuitiveness that it would take to really use the product because they have a patented drag and drop technology that makes it really easy to take the different, you know, attributes or events that you want to measure and you know, put it right into a canvas to view.   [0:04:23] Taylor Gibb: Wow. Oh, that's interesting. That sounds a little bit familiar here at Drew's events canvas. [crosstalk] You just slid right into our lingo. And I'd also be interested to hear a little more about that just because Looker, I think touts itself perhaps even more so as being an accessible kind of platform. And I know at least some of my friends who work with Tableau and their suite, it's oftentimes kind of a point of pride to be able to navigate. So, you know, I'm very good at Sequel. I can use Tableau very well, is something that you see pretty frequently on Linkedin, on a resume as a skillset.   [0:04:55] Jesse Halpert: It's like a cert almost.   [0:04:56] Taylor Gibb: You can take classes for it. Yeah. Oh 100% whereas I feel like, I mean I'm going to be shooting myself in the foot here a little talking about how little I know, but Looker I think is intuitive for someone like me to be able to pick up on and to use pretty effectively and I know that our data BI team right now is face-palming because they think of how many questions I asked them on a daily basis. But still, did you find though that when you were at working with accounts, when you're selling into these accounts that there was a general consensus that this was the easiest way to be able to query and use your data?   [0:05:30] Jesse Halpert: If you're in any of those organizations, I think you get exposed most to your product and you get comfortable and familiar, so I think it's easy to say. I haven't used Looker enough frankly, to really give that impartial of an opinion on that.   [0:05:45] PJ: Fair.   [0:05:46] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, a very-   [0:05:47] PJ: You don't want half-informations here. It's like eating half of your Brussels sprouts.   [0:05:52] Taylor Gibb: No, not something that we do here at Braze.   [0:05:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, we go full sprout.   [0:05:55] Taylor Gibb: Full sprouts 2019.   [0:05:57] Jesse Halpert: I mean another aspect to this is, you know them moving into Seattle and the West Coast, obviously something that I hadn't really thought much about before until the whole Amazon thing is like, you know with that comes certain tax breaks and with that comes the expectation of giving back to the community in some way.   [0:06:15] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting.   [0:06:17] Jesse Halpert: And so, I mean traditionally Tableau and Salesforce, they're pretty philanthropic. They're kind of like all about giving back to the areas that they have offices. So I'm actually interested to see how that unfolds in the coming months and if there'll be any big initiatives. Mr. Benioff I'm sure has some big plans for Seattle.   [0:06:37] Taylor Gibb: I'm sure, whether Seattle wants it or not, maybe. One thing I was going to say, but maybe it's a segue for another time here is I'm interested just in the fact that salesforce already had an in-house BI tool and SBI suite that they were using that they were all about, right? This was what they built their data systems on and as a company that typically does buy and, something we've said before, "Frankenstein" in software, interesting to make this move for a completely outside data tool when they've already got this built in house. So one thing I'm curious about, other than whatever Seattle kind of grabbed that they're making there, do you suppose that this is coming mostly as table stakes for Google having purchased Looker?   [0:07:24] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think a lot of it, they probably had plenty of time to self reflect and see that either the tool wasn't beefed up to the point that they needed it to be, that they weren't seeing themselves in a lot of competitive situations, or probably a combo of both. And I think a lot of that might be similar for what Google went through too. I think they both had, you know, some sort of, I don't want to say half baked, I don't think that's a good way to put it, but probably not like to the full power of something like a Tableau or a Looker or even, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, which they're able to sort of throw in a with their Microsoft suite. And I think by way of Google purchasing Looker by way of a Salesforce purchasing Tableau, it probably will make it a bit more of an arms race between those three, you know all having something that's a little bit more powerful to sell to their clients.   [0:08:15] PJ: Yeah, good point. And you know what we're going to do is we'll get into kind of the details of each one and obviously we're not here to rip on any products, but well more just kind of like highlight the benefits of each. But before we get down and dirty with that, Taylor, you want to take us into the Looker situation?   [0:08:32] Taylor Gibb: Just in terms of the purchase of Looker? How Looker works? Our use of looker? I mean, I'm ready to speak to all of it from a very-   [0:08:41] PJ: You gotta be more specific.   [0:08:42] Taylor Gibb: Come on, man. You coming at me with Looker. Alright. Again, BI Team, I apologize, I may butcher it. But I want to first of all frame this as coming from someone who uses Looker who benefits greatly from Looker and our team using it. And my use, as you know, I'm a Success Manager is primarily being able to share with our clients the results that they're getting from campaigns that they send out. So it's so easy to be able to use things like Look ML, which is kind of the Looker language, to share things that others have built to be able to visualize. So Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for 2.6 billion... Basically Thomas Kurian, who's the man who was handed the reigns to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. So it's end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud as your AWS on-premises databases. So one thing that I took away from this, from this quote that they've decided to pin their PR on is that they're looking to make this a connective kind of grab, right? So they've got Looker now and they're doing so because it's a tool that allows you to connect all sorts of different data. I think that's important when you're thinking Google Cloud, because so often the pain points with a big juggernaut like Salesforce are that you're having to go through crazy hoops and loops to be able to get all of your products to mesh together seamlessly. Google is saying, don't even worry about that pain point. We've picked Looker specifically because it makes it easy to connect to what they need. And so I think that that's something that really stands out. Google was also the first in this... You know, arms race was a good way to put it, earlier. They were the first to make this acquisition. I think that it really frames them as being a forward thinking organization and it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes of this in terms of the Google suite, in terms of what we as consumers are able to glean from Looker, but also what they do with their data internally.   [0:10:43] PJ: I'm interested to see how that will affect Looker's company in general. Kind of like their, you know, product roadmap, their priorities and stuff. Like I'm sure Google have big plans for them.   [0:10:53] Taylor Gibb: Big time.   [0:10:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it too, the data consolidation. I think it'll just make it really, really easy for any company regardless of the size to just be able to take all of their data and put it into a visual analytics platform, which was probably a little bit more of a difficult process, you know, prior to these purchases I think. So I think at the end of the day it's gonna benefit the end user and the companies that are, you know you're a Google house or Salesforce type of house.   [0:11:18] Taylor Gibb: Totally. And I love that all of this is about the demystification of data to your average user. They're saying that they want everybody from their actual BI analytics team to people like myself, a Success Manager who may not be as in the weeds with data, to be able to glean the important information from the data that's being pulled in. Because so often you see with these older legacy, some of my clients working with a ton of super valuable data but like unable to do anything with it because it's hidden in all these folders that only certain people know how to access and use and pivot on. So definitely a good thing for the end user, if anything.   [0:11:55] PJ: Well the end user is the real winner today, I think. All right, now the Looker versus Tableau smack down, all this information has been helpfully provided to us by SelectHub. Thank you, SelectHub. And so now we're just going to go over some of these different facets of the product to give you their perspective on which company has the advantage. So data visualization, you know, data is presented visually for easy interpretation. The winner there, Tableau over looker. I'm sorry, Looker, and I thought that was actually Looker's big.   [0:12:28] Taylor Gibb: That's what I thought too going into this. But again, we could see that in the Google acquisition, that wasn't necessarily what they pinned everything on, but I'm with you. I thought that Looker, I mean it's about looking at things. So you would think visualizations.   [0:12:43] PJ: Well you know what they do have the edge on, though? Analytics. Information is quantified and evaluated for a portrait of company trends and future possibilities.   [0:12:52] Taylor Gibb: Future possibilities.   [0:12:54] PJ: Point to Looker. Very nice. This next one, online analytical processing. This is OLAP.   [0:13:02] Taylor Gibb: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] PJ: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] Jesse Halpert: People don't talk enough about OLAP.   [0:13:04] Taylor Gibb: Maybe you should talk more about it Jesse.   [0:13:06] Jesse Halpert: I'm good.   [0:13:09] PJ: OLAP functionalities provide access to databases and web based analysis, and so this goes to Tableau.   [0:13:15] Taylor Gibb: Not only does it go to Tableau, but apparently Looker, at least at the time of this publication, had no means of OLAP-ing.   [0:13:22] Jesse Halpert: It's daunting.   [0:13:23] PJ: Yeah, that's a big, big... But it's also, you mentioned that it's kind of an old school...   [0:13:28] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, it's probably more of like a box checking thing.   [0:13:31] PJ: Yeah. Gotcha. And then next up, document management. Convert reports into different file formats and share analytical findings, both very strong there, which is nice.   [0:13:42] Taylor Gibb: And this is something that we do with our clients fairly frequently. Again, democratizing data across both processes and companies. So the ability to send a PDF of a certain chart that we've created to an end user, a marketer who just wants to have something on their boss's desk to say numbers are up, it's huge to be able to just press a button and do that export. Cause I know so many other times I would even have to go into something like Keynote and create a separate chart. So not sure what tableau has to offer there, but I can say it's a simple but super effective tool for again, someone like me who's an end user but not necessarily savvy enough to be doing a lot of this stuff my own.   [0:14:19] PJ: Yeah. And that's a big pattern we see right, with democratizing these tools and making it easy for a marketer to really get their hands dirty into data. And so looking forward to seeing how Tableau continues to push the envelope on that. I think Looker is already on a great path for it.   [0:14:33] Jesse Halpert: Yeah. I think one thing you'll see in each is that it's really easy for somebody who's a power user to, you know, again like you said, democratize the data and share it with people who are end users and don't have that type of analytical savvy and just make it really easy to serve up like one off visualizations and reports that they might receive regularly.   [0:14:50] PJ: Just like some veggies.   [0:14:52] Taylor Gibb: Just like veggies, you knew it! PJ just gave me this look like don't you dare mention vegetables again.   [0:14:58] PJ: Serving it up hot. Next, decision services. So financial management features provide analysis of monetary information. Both also very strong in this area. Integrations, the ability to connect with other systems provides multiple sources and functionalities.   [0:15:15] Taylor Gibb: Big win fir my buddy Looker and remember, that's what they were saying at Google. That's why they purchased this solution in the first place, which is really huge in terms of like market value for Google in general, that they're thinking about things like this. Because Salesforce does everything and they do it pretty well, but when you're trying to get data from one point to another? It's difficult.   [0:15:36] PJ: It's all about making that a fluid process and like, and that kind of lends itself as well to like future-proofing, right? Because you know, we talk a lot about being channel agnostic. If you have that kind of flexibility, I think you're, you're opening yourself to the future and you're giving yourself the ability to be agile, whatever channel should show itself.   [0:15:53] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. It's that- [crosstalk 00:15:55].   [0:15:58] Jesse Halpert: So motivational.   [0:15:59] Taylor Gibb: At this motivational podcast, listen to it before you go to sleep and you will be successful. But it's like that Woody Allen quote, right? That's like "relationship is a shark; if it's not moving forward, it's dying." This is another thing, right? Google is like, we got to keep buying more stuff like, and Salesforce of course has to follow suit, but maybe more thoughtful on-   [0:16:16] PJ: I have been called the Woody Allen of Big Data, so.   [0:16:18] Taylor Gibb: I knew it.   [0:16:19] Jesse Halpert: I don't know if that's something you really want to hang your hat.   [0:16:21] PJ: Yeah, you're right, you're right.   [0:16:25] Taylor Gibb: Gonna take that out in editing, you think?   [0:16:27] PJ: Hey, Midnight in Paris, shout out to y'all. It was good! Owen Wilson!   [0:16:32] Jesse Halpert: Wow.   [0:16:33] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:16:35] PJ: Wooooow. Last one, Big Data integration. Access to Big Data programs for comprehensive analysis. And this ad goes to Tableau. So thanks again SelectHub for facilitating the Looker v. Tableau smack down. It sounds like a WWF event. [inaudible] Oh, it literally is. That's right.   [0:16:58] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of vegetables, PJ, I got one more hot take to kind of take us out here. So we've been speaking in a very high level, obviously, again kind of a layman's view of these very powerful data tools and these very powerful companies, right? Salesforce and Google. We've been talking about these bigger companies and the ways that they're going to be using, the ways that this gives a competitive advantage. There's also a take to be made here that a few pundits are talking about and that this feels almost like an act of desperation, right? Because this is a hot sector right now. Data visualization, data in general as it becomes more and more accessible for people like us, it really sets your company apart as being future proof, something that you said earlier "a forward thinking company." Could it be that this grab wasn't so much, you know, thinking about the best ways to be using tools like this, but was perhaps an act of desperation, a grab for table stakes here?   [0:17:54] Jesse Halpert: I don't even know if it's a hot take.   [0:17:57] PJ: Yeah, I think it's a lukewarm take.   [0:17:59] Jesse Halpert: Its a lukewarm take. Yeah, I think they were just able to see that their products weren't as strong in this market and this is a market that applies to every line of the business. Not only is it future proofing companies, but it's something that, again like we talked about earlier, democratizes the data across an organization. And they were losing ground and they were able to acquire two really forward looking products and were able to bolster their line a little bit in a place where they were probably hurting.   [0:18:29] PJ: Yeah, I think we can call it like casual desperation if that is a thing and makes sense, you know? Because they're at the top of their game, right? It's like, like let's look at the cautionary tale of Blockbuster. If you're not like looking ahead to like either your business and how it will evolve or potentially other businesses that you can loop into your revenue streams, then you know you're really not thinking about the future health of your business.   [0:18:55] Taylor Gibb: You're gonna get Blockbuster-ed.   [0:18:56] PJ: Don't get Blockbuster-ed, y'all. Come on, now.   [0:18:59] Taylor Gibb: Look into OLAP, don't get Blockbuster-ed   [0:19:02] PJ: Exactly. Good for them acquiring Looker. I think Looker has a bright future, but I wonder what they stand to lose by trying to assimilate Looker into their product suite. Because looker is so good right now at what they do, when you try to, we said it on a previous podcast, you mentioned it again, Frankenstein-ing products-   [0:19:24] Taylor Gibb: I'm gonna trademark that.   [0:19:25] PJ: We need to, because you know, Salesforce is just creating the Frankenstein of all these products and as long as you can do it in like an agile way and really mold them together in a way where they speak well and it's architecturally enabling, as long as you can create it in that way, I'm all about it. But if you're just purchasing to stay relevant and slap-sticking it together, you know, Looker's got a lot of fanfare as far as our industry goes right now. If you're just doing it for that and you haven't thought about the execution, maybe rethink that bad boy.   [0:19:55] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. At the cost of several billion, I mean worth a second look.   [0:20:00] PJ: I think that was a steal, 2.6 billion. Like I think Looker is going to be, I mean it generates a ton of money.   [0:20:06] Jesse Halpert: I do think the integration will be fairly seamless for companies that already do have Google cloud.   [0:20:12] PJ: Yeah, good for them. So you companies that have Google cloud, you are in luck.   [0:20:17] Taylor Gibb: Oh very good point. And actually I really liked that as well.   [0:20:21] Jesse Halpert: And I think that's what both organizations are ultimately looking to do. Kind of you know, push this new product on them.   [0:20:28] Taylor Gibb: That's exciting news for my clients. You guys out there like using Looker? Good news! I have a feeling there's going to be some announcements on the books here.   [0:20:35] PJ: Absolutely. And for those listeners out there that aren't as familiar with the MarTech landscape, do some research. There's all sorts of products from engagement tools to attribution tools and you could say the analytics portion of that is like eating your vegetables. You get to eat your vegetables first and then you get the steak. Getting into visualizations and data and having it inform your strategy, that's just how you move forward. That's how you improve.   [0:21:02] Jesse Halpert: What's the baked potato in this analogy?   [0:21:04] Taylor Gibb: Attribution, I think.   [0:21:06] PJ: Yeah. Cause that's like nice. And I mean, I love a baked potato with a little butter on it.   [0:21:10] Taylor Gibb: You're telling me. Well, you know, after you've had this potato, this steak, these veggies, you know what these companies got to do, don't you? They gotta get that bread.   [0:21:18] PJ: Oh ho-ho!   [0:21:19] Jesse Halpert: I thought it was going somewhere else and, yeah.   [0:21:22] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:21:23] PJ: On that note, do your research. Look into both of these companies, both doing fantastic things. Eat your veggies, eat your bread, eat your baked potato. And for those of you who don't know, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, head to braze.com. I'd like to thank my guests Jesse and Taylor. Thank you guys so much for being here.   [0:21:45] Jesse Halpert: Thanks for having us.   [0:21:46] Taylor Gibb: Anytime!   [0:21:48] PJ: And you too. Thanks for stopping by guys. Take care. [0:21:50]

Self-proclaimed scooter experts, Cody Thornton (Digital First AE) and Pat Forquer (Enterprise AE), give myself and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) their views on the proliferation of e-scooters in major cities, the safety risks involved, and the competitive landscape for micro-mobility talent.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your mar-tech industry discuss digest. I'm thrilled today to have with me Spencer Burke, VP of growth. Spence, how we doing?   [0:00:28] Spencer Burke: Doing Great, thanks PJ.   [0:00:30] PJ: Also, Patrick Forquer from our sales org here in the east. Pat?   [0:00:34] Patrick Forquer: Oh, PJ. Doing excellent. Thanks for having me.   [0:00:37] PJ: And first time ever having a remote guest in from LA from our sales org on the west coast. Cody Thornton. How you doing buddy?   [0:00:45] Cody Thornton: PJ, I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me. Excited for this.   [0:00:50] Spencer Burke: Coast to coast.   [0:00:51] PJ: Coast to coast. It feels good. I mean, also this is the scooter episode. We have a lot of articles that we're going to digest today all around scooter sharing companies. Cody Thornton is a big scooter guy.   [0:01:03] Cody Thornton: Big. I am so pro scooter. It's not even funny.   [0:01:06] PJ: One of the biggest. Before we jump into the content, let's just start with a little disclaimer. The company Braze, we work with plenty of scooter sharing companies. All the comments you're going to hear today are just personal opinions. Braze does not promote or disparage any scooter app. We are advocates of all of them. So Patrick, I feel like you have a strong opinion perhaps.   [0:01:27] Patrick Forquer: Ugh, love scooters. Like I'm so onboard with scooters. I'm fully ... I don't know how you call being on a scooter, but I'm on scooter on board.   [0:01:37] PJ: Both.   [0:01:37] Patrick Forquer: Both feet. Left foot, right foot, gripping tightly signaling with traffic, the whole thing. I'm onboard.   [0:01:45] PJ: Spencer, where do you lie?   [0:01:46] Spencer Burke: I have a confession. I've never ridden a scooter.   [0:01:49] PJ: Wow.   [0:01:49] Spencer Burke: Escooters are brand new to me, so I'm a blank slate. I am happy to hear PJ's perspective. Cody and pat, try and convince me. All righty. So Cody, you are a huge advocate for the scoot scoot. Am I right?   [0:02:01] Cody Thornton: Yes. I am a major advocate. I feel like ... I'm from Los Angeles, live in San Francisco., I feel like two great markets for the scooter industry and these companies. I'm just a big fan of micro mobility from the accessibility and practicality of it to the environmental benefits. I think there's a lot of short distance transportation that is much easier and quicker with, per se, a scooter rather than using an Uber, driving your car, filling parking garages. So I will admit I think there's a lot to figure out from safety to legislation in the space, but overall I am a big fan of scooters. I think it's pretty promising.   [0:02:44] PJ: Well, let's just kick it off. Our first article of the day, Byrd is launching a two seater electric vehicle to become more than a kick scooter startup. Byrd has just unveiled the Byrd cruiser, an electric vehicle that is essentially a blend between a bicycle and a moped. The Byrd cruiser can seat up to two people, and depending on the market, the cruiser will either be pedal assist or just have a peg. Also equipped with hydraulic disc brakes. Very exciting. They can stop. 52 volt battery, and many ebikes have it as well. It's designed to handle hills. So off-roading is an option. I mean it gets pretty hilly out in SF, so you must be thrilled about it, Cody.   [0:03:24] Cody Thornton: The two things I'm most excited about are definitely the hills and the hydraulic disc brakes. I was in Austin last week riding a scooter that the brakes were definitely not working, so I was worried I would end up in one of our later articles about injuries, but yes. San Francisco being quite hilly., I think this is a big opportunity. Honestly, it's pretty interesting as well. I think too Byrd launching this cruiser has been able to categorize it as an ebike rather than a scooter, so they've been able to avoid a lot of the local legislation and government policies and politics around it. So, I'm personally super excited about this. I cannot wait to throw Patrick on the back of my Byrd cruiser and just launch up these SF hills man.   [0:04:09] PJ: What a dream. It reminds me of Dumb and Dumber. I can get 70 miles to the gallon on this hog.   [0:04:16] Cody Thornton: We are going to be the first people that take a Byrd to aspen.   [0:04:19] PJ: We can only do it in Aspen. That's the best obviously. I mean does this open the door for like other vehicles where they're going to come out with a whole like series?   [0:04:28] Spencer Burke: I think we will continue to see more diversity because to Cody's point right now it's scooters are fantastic for like last mile delivery of like point A to point B, you know, 10 minute ride, 15 minute ride, but you're not going to be doing your daily commute unless you live and work in Santa Monica where Byrd is located, which is my dream, just saying. It's like taking a scooter to work. I mean, [crosstalk 00:04:50].   [0:04:50] Cody Thornton: I don't know. Once they're in New York why wouldn't you?   [0:04:53] Spencer Burke: I mean can you imagine riding a scooter in New York? That is literally my nightmare.   [0:04:57] Cody Thornton: Oh my gosh.   [0:04:58] Spencer Burke: I'm so scared. I can barely ... I'm afraid to walk in New York [crosstalk 00:05:00].   [0:05:01] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, you got to wear a helmet while you're walking in New York.   [0:05:05] PJ: You got to wrap yourself in bubble wrap to get on that scooter. There's a lot of precautions.   [0:05:10] Patrick Forquer: Is that a thing yet? Is there an aggressive scooting community?   [0:05:14] PJ: In?   [0:05:15] Patrick Forquer: Anywhere? Like you know ...   [0:05:17] Cody Thornton: You're talking to it right now.   [0:05:17] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I was about to say exhibit A over here. Cody I think is the president of a local advocacy groups for scooters.   [0:05:24] PJ: Let's talk a little bit more about Byrd because Apple announced his support for Apple Pay and this is relevant to Byrd as well as Bonobos and a handful of other companies. Cody, you want to, you want to speak to this one a little bit? I know you were pretty jazzed about it.   [0:05:37] Cody Thornton: Yeah, definitely. I thought this was really interesting. I actually recently got a new iPhone, had to go through the whole registration process for Byrd again and when I went through you buy it and pretty much the number of rides you want right now, so they have a 20 package ride. If you want to buy, that's their most popular one. You click it, you go through the checkout process, etc. I'd like to think I'm a little bit more technically savvy than the mass market out there, so just going through this process, I saw a larger opportunity for them to make this more seamless. From firsthand experience when I was in San Diego last year, I had a really interesting epiphany I guess. Because I was there around Memorial Day weekend and there was a ton of people who I'd say not your target demographic for scooter riders, older men and women, younger girls and boys, etc. But everyone was just wondering how to get onto the scooter. So I haven't had to download the app. And you know, I just saw it as a big organic growth vehicle for them. So I think partnerships like this with Apple Pay's NFC technology only lower the barrier of entry for all these people that are trying to figure out how to get on these scooters or ride and conversely in San Francisco right now, Lime and Byrd are not allowed in San Francisco. So I believe it's Spin, Jump, and Scoot are the three brands there, right? So most people, if you're an avid scooter goer like myself, Patrick, etc, you're most likely going to use a variety of different services depending on the city where you are. So I think technology like this, partnerships, just makes it way easier to get up and running and ultimately become a user of these different companies' services, or the scooter.   [0:07:22] PJ: So Cody, what is the reason that like Byrd and Lime are barred in SF versus these other companies?   [0:07:28] Cody Thornton: To my knowledge, it is all local legislation. So it was a pretty guerrilla-esque marketing tactic when these companies first started going. So you would just wake up one morning and there was just dozens of these scooters on the street and no one had any idea of where they came from, what to do with them. And again, these thoughts are our own and I am not entirely sure, but I'm pretty confident that Byrd and LIme were two of the first that went out to market in San Francisco specifically. So these scooters just were all over the street. And I remember it was a mess honestly. It was crazy. You all know San Francisco is a relatively condensed city. So you were just walking to work. There's scooters everywhere, scooters in trash cans, scooters all over the sidewalk, scooters leaning up against buildings. So, they wanted to put some legislation in place, one, to have a little bit more of a framework to operate in the cities specifically, but also limit the amount of sheer scooters that were there. I'm not sure exactly what the process was of how they determine the three vendors that were for the initial shared scooter rollout in San Francisco, but Scoot, Lime, and Spin were of the first three that got rolled out. So I'm speaking with various people that work at these organizations. They are extremely optimistic that they will be back in San Francisco sooner rather than later, but they're just going through the necessary to making it "more legit" if you will.   [0:08:59] PJ: Got you. Got to make it legit.   [0:09:01] Cody Thornton: Too legit to quit.   [0:09:02] Spencer Burke: Obviously. I mean that does kind of speak to one of the articles we're going to talk about later, PJ, about around the consolidation and kind of like partnerships happening within the scooter industry right now. It makes sense for someone like an Apple who maybe doesn't know excel in scooter production, right, to partner with someone like Byrd, just to kind of get their foot in the door so to speak, but also lead to a better overall user experience. So I use the Apple Pay on the Byrd app as well. It works. It's incredible.   [0:09:29] Cody Thornton: Nice.   [0:09:29] PJ: Have any of you guys a bit the dust on a scooter yet? Pat, Cody?   [0:09:36] Patrick Forquer: I'm clean. My record's clean so far. I'm going to LA tomorrow, so check back with me in a couple of days.   [0:09:43] PJ: Yeah, Spencer, I know you have yet to ride. So I think we know your answer. Cody, what do you have over there?   [0:09:51] Cody Thornton: Oh, I most definitely have. I have a few battle wounds that I'm quite proud of myself. Can't wait to tell my kids about these one day. Some pretty awesome scars. But no, in all seriousness, it happened in the time that I actually fell in Santa Monica. I'd like to think I'm ... You know, I like to snowboard, I like to skateboard, I like to surf, all that jazzy stuff. So I feel like I'm inclined to riding these things more than your average consumer, if you will. And so I was riding one morning in Santa Monica, I'm still not quite sure what happened to be completely honest, but it just beeped twice, went, "Beep, beep," real quick and just ejected me over the handlebars. And luckily I didn't get to seriously hurt, but I was honestly laughing. I looked like Gabby Douglas in the Olympics just mounting the handlebars. I had a puffy jacket on. I slid for like 20 feet. People ran over to make sure if I'm okay, I'm just laying there hysterically laughing. I'm like, "How did this just happen?" But yeah, I got a nice little raspberry on my hip, on my elbow. And so you know, I'm kind of in this weird middle ground of the injury topic we will talk about because it's inevitably dangerous. You can move quickly, very nimbly. People do not obey the sidewalk laws, the bike lane laws, random freak of nature accidents similar to the one I went through. That said, I mean I could wholeheartedly say I fell because of an issue with the scooter. I think most of the time in a lot of the injuries that are happening, they are rider induced so people are not riding responsibly. They're potentially under the influence of, say, alcohol potentially. But yeah, I guess we can get into that. But that is my story of how I really ate it on a scooter.   [0:11:51] PJ: I mean, why don't we just get into right now? This next article here is the boom in electrical scooters leads to more injuries and even fatalities. So as stand up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. There are no comprehensive statistics available. But a rough count by the Associated Press of media reports turned up at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Nine were on rented scooters and two were on ones the victims owned. Spencer, you have some thoughts on this [crosstalk 00:12:34].   [0:12:32] Spencer Burke: Yeah, this article is pretty frustrating for me because it doesn't add any context. They're clearly trying to sensationalize the fact that people have been hurt and killed, which is terrible. Don't want to minimize the impact of that to anyone. But I think there's a bigger picture issue here that it's really challenging to be a pedestrian, to be a cyclist, now to be a scooterist, or whatever the official term is, in really dense cities. It's not safe. In New York City, in many cities in the U.S. there's something called vision zero which is getting pedestrian deaths to zero as a result of traffic fatalities. So I've got some stats here that I pulled up, but every year 4,000 New Yorkers are injured and 250 are killed as a result of traffic crashes. And it's the leading cause of injury related death for kids under 14, so cars in cities are dangerous and people who are not in cars tend to get hurt. Even people in cars get hurt. So I would have liked to see in an article like this, and generally in the coverage, it is not just unique to this one article, more of an understanding of what it's like to be someone who's commuting not in a car and not in public transit, and how we can make that safer and more accessible.   [0:13:50] Patrick Forquer: Yeah. I think when you look at it to this articles from the Santa Monica Daily Press, which if you've ever been to Santa Monica scooters are a very polarizing topic there. Just like they are my hometown of Atlanta. When I go home, people are either ... It's very polarizing, one side or the other. You either love them or hate them. And what I don't understand about the hate part, especially in a place like Atlanta where if you need to go half a mile, you get in your car and drive there, right? It's like, they're all over the sidewalks there, you know, people are just leaving them parked.   [0:14:24] Spencer Burke: When was the last time you were on the sidewalk?   [0:14:25] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, exactly. Like when was the last time you walked anywhere in Atlanta? Zero times have you walked anywhere that wasn't like your backyard. But the interesting stat to me from this article was a vast majority of the injuries were after, I think, 6:00PM or 7:00PM so I think we can all use our imagination there.   [0:14:44] Cody Thornton: People are just super tired, just crashed on the scooter after a long day.   [0:14:48] Patrick Forquer: Right, exactly.   [0:14:49] Cody Thornton: Exhausted, 6:30, just exhausted. But I think we will continue to see like a maturation of the regulatory environment around this, which is probably warranted and needed, but at the same time, I think if it was kind of wild west to start, we're kind of moving towards a place that's much more controlled in a safer environment. So hopefully you get some kind of guardrails in place and people can scoot and peace.   [0:15:13] Spencer Burke: It's the same for bicycles. Like this hate isn't unique to scooters. People get upset that they're building bike lanes in their neighborhood and it's taking away parking. So bikes have been around for a couple of hundred years. I think that the regulatory environment could maybe be improved. But I think we're just seeing the repeat of some same problems people have with making dense, urban areas less car friendly.   [0:15:36] PJ: Do you think they're gonna start making it legal in New York City? Do you think that's going to happen?   [0:15:41] Cody Thornton: I sure hope so.   [0:15:42] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I feel like New York is such a interesting market because it's so crazy. Could you imagine just an onslaught of scooters just coming into Manhattan? Oh my gosh.   [0:15:52] PJ: I mean where I live-   [0:15:55] Spencer Burke: The Santa Monica Daily press will have a few thoughts about it.   [0:16:00] PJ: I mean in Brooklyn where I live it would be fine, right? But like midtown Manhattan on a scooter-   [0:16:04] Spencer Burke: Like where we work, yeah.   [0:16:05] PJ: Yeah.   [0:16:06] Spencer Burke: It would be a nightmare.   [0:16:06] PJ: Like where we are right now would be tough.   [0:16:10] Cody Thornton: Yeah. I had a interesting ... Because that was actually one of the primary storylines out of South be y Southwest this year in Austin, Texas was the number of emergency room admissions they had or scooter related injuries and it was a pretty interesting thread on Twitter that I was following about all these injuries and different people that were there covering the conference that were going into the emergency room for scooter related accidents. Yeah, I think to Spencer's point, there definitely needs to be, whether it's better onboarding ... In San Francisco there's the service, Scoot, if anyone is familiar with that. So it's similar to the Byrd scooter we talked about, but they're more moped like so I'm not sure what they top out at miles per hour, but they have a helmet in the back you get on, you can take them up hills, you can ride them across the city. It's like an electric moped. But prior to getting access to the application once you go through onboarding, it requires you to watch a 20 minute video. So I don't know if something like that will happen with these scooter companies in terms of like educating their riders more. But back to the Austin point and South by Southwest, similar to what Patrick said, 90% of the injuries were reported to be after 6:00 PM, so again, we can use our imaginations of what is happening then. Like Spencer said, bikes have been around for hundreds of years. We see the Go bikes popping up everywhere, the Jump bikes, like we're not just going to get rid of bikes. Bikes are inevitably dangerous as well, but I think we just need to have a little bit more understanding on both sides. But yeah, it's a complex issue and I don't have the answer. I'm just going to go ahead ride with my AirPods in and let my hair flow in the wind on those bad boys.   [0:17:54] PJ: Cody. I don't have the answer. I'm just a dude.   [0:17:57] Spencer Burke: Just a guy.   [0:17:58] PJ: Wait, Cody, do you need to wear a helmet or is that not even a thing?   [0:18:03] Cody Thornton: Man, you're really hitting all my scooter knowledge today. That's another a soft spot for me that you do not need to wear a helmet. I will not disclose which one, but I personally worked with one of the scooter companies to bring them on board to become a customer Braze. And the example that I gave them is last year in 2018 Memorial Day weekend in San Diego, I was riding and my friends and I around eight in the morning were ushered over to the side of the road by a group of police officers. And we were cited for not riding with helmets. We had no idea that you even had to wear a helmets when you were riding these scooters at the time. So we get our citations. It was very, you know, cordial, fine experience, frustrating to say the least. But we go away and this older woman says, "Haven't you been watching the news? They have been handing out tickets to everyone not wearing helmets on the scooters." And I'm like, "No, I'm not watching the San Diego Daily News on my vacation. I'm sorry." But so we talked about using geo-fencing technology that we have here at Braze to run a notification to these people saying, "Hey, they're issuing citations in this area. Make sure you're wearing a helmet." Since then, I believe it was January 1, 2019 a statewide law has been passed that helmets are no longer required to ride scooters in California. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't want to wear a helmet when I wear these things.   [0:19:29] PJ: Based on personal experience.   [0:19:30] Cody Thornton: I also want people to be safe too.   [0:19:32] PJ: That's so California. "Hey man, you going to ride a scooter?   [0:19:36] Spencer Burke: No helmet needed. Just a slip tank in the summer months.   [0:19:40] Patrick Forquer: For what it's worth ... This doesn't apply to scooting since you're not doing any work, but I think there have been some studies in Australia where they looked at the net benefit between the increase to injury of not riding with a helmet and the health benefit of riding your bike every day for commuting, and on the whole it's better for you if you're every day riding a bike, getting to work, getting some exercise. So, that's been a lot of the influence for just increasing people's mobility, giving them access to these kinds of things, even if they don't require a helmet, which is the same for city bikes here in New York.   [0:20:13] PJ: All right, well you guys one more to go left. We're tight on time, but let's get to it. So scooter sharing startups slug it out in a war for niche talent. On demand scooter sharing startups are competing to hire from one another as they struggle with a limited talent pool chasing niche skills. These startups fast emerging as alternatives to last mile mobility require people with experience around internet of things based supply chain, design, and manufacturing. These are specialized skills as the technology itself is relatively new. So, it sounds like there's just not enough people to go around that know how to do this stuff right now, especially in your-   [0:20:49] Cody Thornton: Yeah, I mean, they know where to find me. [crosstalk 00:20:52].   [0:20:54] Patrick Forquer: The one thing that surprised me most when I first rode a Byrd was just how like the product is great. It looks great, it works really well. The check-in process, seamless. Offline, online, the whole thing was fantastic. So, I could imagine this like this is a booming space. Five years ago, no one was talking about last mile scooter delivery. So, not surprising and it's like that's the most kind of Silicon Valley thing ever is like competing for scooter talent.   [0:21:27] Spencer Burke: What about all those guys at Razor that were in the market 10 years ago?   [0:21:31] PJ: Razor. Throwback.   [0:21:34] Patrick Forquer: Getting crushed   [0:21:35] PJ: Yeah. Where's razor and all of this? Huge missed opportunity Razor.   [0:21:38] Patrick Forquer: Totally.   [0:21:39] PJ: To Pat's point, I thought it was pretty interesting when working with a few of the scooter companies myself. I didn't really realize it either until like ... In all seriousness, like five years ago, no one was talking about like this mass mobility or the scooter phenomenon that is going on, right? And to Pat's point as well too, I think from the onboarding experience and signing up and aside from realizing how great of a product it was, obviously first and foremost, how liberating riding a scooter is. Like that is just the greatest feeling in the entire world. I felt like I was a 10 year old kid, again. It's interesting. They're pretty well built products honestly. And you know, they have a very functioning mobile application that's powering these things. They have the actual physical scooters themselves. A lot of these companies are poaching talent from the likes of Lyft and Uber that not only from, you know, like on the mobile side of things but also from the legal side. Like these companies have massive battles in front of them on local government, statewide government, federal government and having experience with that. So I think, one to, obviously the consolidation aspect is pretty interesting from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective as well. But also I'm sure there's going to be a lot of acqui-hires in this space as well by these companies that will emerge as the juggernauts and I guess it's yet to be determined who those companies will be. And to anyone out there looking to have a career change, maybe look into last minute mobility tech. I don't know. It sounds like there's a need. Spencer, Cody. Patrick, thanks so much for being with me, you guys.   [0:23:13] Spencer Burke: It's my pleasure, PJ.   [0:23:14] Patrick Forquer: Thanks, Peej.   [0:23:15] Cody Thornton: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Be safe out there people. Don't be afraid, but be smart while being dumb.   [0:23:20] PJ: Absolutely, and for all those first time listeners out there, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, go to Braze.com. Find out. Thanks again for being with us.

I joined Tanner McGrath, Head of Growth Engineering and Product Analytics at Amplitude, in San Francisco to hear about the circumstances that brought about the need for Amplitude's product. Tanner also shared his personal story of making moves from video game development to Postmates product manager to the tech renaissance man he is today at Amplitude.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello, again. Welcome back to Braze for impact, your Martech industry discussed digest. Thrilled to have with me today for a partner spotlight, Tanner McGrath from Amplitude, their head of growth engineering and product analytics. How's it going, Tanner?   [0:00:31] Tanner McGrath: It's great. Happy to be here.   [0:00:33] PJ Bruno: Yeah man, I'm looking at your Linkedin here, and you're a real Renaissance man. Product Manager, Developer, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Growth Marketing, UX Designer. I mean, do you have any other hobbies that we need to know about right now upfront?   [0:00:50] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of different aspects of making a company grow.   [0:00:58] PJ Bruno: I love it. I guess it touches every part of the company, too. Well, before we get into your journey that led you here to Amplitude, I love the tagline, and I heard this first. We were doing interviews, and I think it was someone on the partnerships team for Amplitude that said, “Helping companies build better products.” It just is such a clean description, but for people out there who might not know more specifically what Amplitude is doing, can you break that down for us a bit?   [0:01:26] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. The way we look at building better products here at Amplitude is, really, if you look at how everything's been changing in the industry, is product is now the revenue center for most companies. Building a better product means building a better company. Here at Amplitude, we see people spending 200 plus minutes within these products ever day. It's like the world is being eaten alive by the digital revolution.   [0:01:55] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:01:56] Tanner McGrath: What we see is, building a better product is not only helping those companies be more successful, but it's also helping everyone out there be more successful in their everyday life. That's the mission here at Amplitude.   [0:02:07] PJ Bruno: That makes sense. I mean, that's usually the place that people get most exposure to the brand, right? Is living in the product, so it tethers back to every single department, right?   [0:02:16] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, absolutely.   [0:02:18] PJ Bruno: Cool. Well, let's rewind, let's take a step back, because one thing that interests me and made me want to talk to you more was the fact that you started off as a client of Braze, back in the day when you were at Postmates. What year was this back at Postmates, when you started there?   [0:02:32] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, 2015.   [0:02:34] PJ Bruno: 2015. Seems like eons ago. So what did the Postmates stack look like when you started there? What kind of set up did they have?   [0:02:42] Tanner McGrath: They had the standard start up, setup. Query and off your production data bases, no AB testing. It really was that standard loading CSVs into MailChimp and it was-   [0:02:55] PJ Bruno: That really does date it doesn't it? Talking about it, its only four years, but Jesus. So no analytics outside of your product database at all?   [0:03:04] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, there was nothing trustworthy in the organization. I really remember coming in, we were having a really, really big delivery volume day, and the whole team was trying to see if we were going to break our previous record, and that meant query in the production data base, and we actually caused an outage from querying in the production data base too much monitoring that. Yeah, it really was no analytics outside of that.   [0:03:34] PJ Bruno: Do you guys hold that up as a victory, when you make something crash like that?   [0:03:37] Tanner McGrath: I don't know if we hold it up as a victory, but definitely a learning.   [0:03:41] PJ Bruno: And that's a victory in some token, sure.   [0:03:43] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah. Definitely made us rethink how we were looking at our growth and our analytics, and really lit a fire in that direction.   [0:03:53] PJ Bruno: Totally. And the stuff that you were doing in Postmates, this was kind of not much competition was around you at this time, right?   [0:04:00] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah, this was pre-competition. This was when everything is up and to the right. I work with a lot of startups here as well, and they're often in cases like that, where this pre-competition, things are up and to the right. You don't ask many questions when you're hitting your growth targets every week.   [0:04:16] PJ Bruno: There's no real need for pushing the envelope on innovation or really big bets.   [0:04:22] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, if you're not taking a close look, everything you're doing is what you're attributing to you making the company successful.   [0:04:30] PJ Bruno: What were the factors that brought Amplitude and Braze into the marketing strategy for Postmates?   [0:04:36] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, it really came down to competition. As the environment becomes more competitive, you're really looking to find an edge and to keep that edge.   [0:04:47] PJ Bruno: So this was 2016, 2017?   [0:04:48] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, yeah, we start to see Uber Eats, DoorDash, other people entering the market, and the space is blowing up. With that, growth becomes a little bit harder when you're not the only one there really creating your category, you really need to know what's working. It's like when you're at a casino, and you're the only one playing a slot machine that's weighted in your favor. And then, all of a sudden the casino starts to be filling up because everyone's winning, but the house is only going to let so much out. You need to become a better gambler. That's what really brought Braze and analytics into the strategy, was we needed to start making more systematic bets as a company, to really keep that competitive edge.   [0:05:35] PJ Bruno: Yeah, that makes sense. It's gotta be tough though, too, because there's just so many different product services and directions you can go, whereas you're given a budget, you need to keep those numbers going up and to the right, how do you choose the right products even? You said systematic bets, I love that. Can you say more about that?   [0:05:54] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. When we think about ... Especially when I think about building better products, it's not just the product you need to improve, it's the team you need to improve. That fundamentally comes down to understanding and learning. You're really only able to do that with certain products. There's many products out there in the landscape that will let you understand what happened. "Was this email, what was its open rate? What was its conversion? Did it actually accomplish that end goal?" But, usually the end of that questioning is, "Why? Why did it have the highest open rate?" Or, "Why did it have the highest conversion?" Or, "Why didn't it?" Being able to answer that "Why" question is not only how you improve your product, but it's also how you improve your team, because your team had a hypothesis at the start, and they're trying to understand why was I right, or why was I wrong, and that's how the team gets better. When the team gets better, the product also gets better. That's really what was the driving force between how do we actually balance getting things done as quickly and efficiently possible, but also making sure that we learn and get better while we're doing that, so that it compounds over time.   [0:07:08] PJ Bruno: So, getting Amplitude and Braze in the mix of your stack, did that inform the makeup of your team? You're saying it takes the right team, so did that service things for you guys?   [0:07:19] Tanner McGrath: That was one of the biggest driving factor for us building our stack, was being able to answer that why. If we can't, as a team, understand why we were actually living or losing, we couldn't get better over time. That was something where we actually tried many different software vendors out there, probably, almost that whole MarTech landscape we gave a try.   [0:07:43] PJ Bruno: It's kind of nice to do a sampling, right? A little tasting.   [0:07:45] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. What we found was that no one really let us offer that why. Then we came across Amplitude, and that really enabled what we called frictionless curiosity at the company, was really being able to be curious about what your customers are doing in your product, and why they're doing that. And then Braze built out currents for us, and that really unlocked a whole new world of being able to answer the why that was not possible in any other tool that we had ever used before.   [0:08:17] PJ Bruno: And the competitors, you adding those two pieces to your stack, that was spurred on by competition. As you guys moved forward, people were copying your approach along the way, right? That was kind of ...   [0:08:28] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, and that's the biggest piece of flattery out there, is when you come up with something creative, and then someone else replicates that, it just adds to that pressure to constantly innovate. That's why we're actually seeing better and better products.   [0:08:44] PJ Bruno: Yeah, these stacks got to be turning into Megazords at this point, just huge transformers.   [0:08:49] Tanner McGrath: Yeah.   [0:08:53] PJ Bruno: Autobots. Talk to me about the transition from client to tech partner, because now your role here at Amplitude is quite different than it was at Postmates.   [0:09:03] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, it's very different and very, very similar in the same way. I spend about 50% of my time, really, thinking about what is the future of product analytics and how can we help companies really set a strategy, set goals, really understand customer health, and really model out their business. It's a lot of things I've been doing in the past, but with a lot of different companies now, which is great. It's almost like what I was doing before, but at scale. There is a slight change, of course, from going from consumer marketplace growth to B2B growth. Definitely a set of nuanced complexities, building out an enterprise B2B Growth Engineering team right here at Amplitude. But, it's great. It's been an awesome transition.   [0:09:54] PJ Bruno: That's great to hear. Let's move onto Amplitude. Amplitude has surfaced, and it's the noise as a best in class product analytics tool. From your experience, what gives Amplitude that competitive edge? What's the differentiator.   [0:10:10] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, the differentiator is, it really goes back to what I was talking about before, is frictionless curiosity, as that the best teams are curious. It's really, really painful to be curious today. Think about what it takes to be curious about your customers, we're talking hundreds, thousands of lines of sequel, ETL jobs, and you've gotta wait a couple days for that compute job to come back, you've got to ask an analyst or a data scientist. It really differentiates by completely flipping that whole paradigm on this head. It's "would you rather hire a product engineer on your team or a data engineer?" With Amplitude, you can invest in your product, and you can enable that team building, that product to really understand what's going on with their customers, so that you actually let your data scientists and analysts use their PhD to actually answer a differentiated question.   [0:11:09] PJ Bruno: That's smart, that makes sense. I was going to ask, what is that a-ha moment for clients and prospects, when it actually hits them, the power of the tool? You mentioned curiosity, so I have to assume that plays into it a little bit.   [0:11:23] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, I think all of that curiosity, what it really results in is people being able to actually better model out, understand their business, and understand customer health. When you talk to a lot of teams today and you ask them, "How do you grow?" You'll get 10 different answers. With Amplitude, what you're able to actually do is, you're enabling the team to see the inputs, measure the outputs, and actually start to understand and model that system over time. That's really the a-ha moment, is when you actually can go into a company and talk about, "Well, how do you grow?" And the teams actually know.   [0:12:05] PJ Bruno: What are some of the best uses of Amplitude that you've seen in your time here?   [0:12:09] Tanner McGrath: Oh, so many. We can go from personalization to even just some of the lowest hanging fruit. I'll call out two things that I always love seeing, one is, especially with user acquisition teams, is when I think about great user acquisition teams, they're doing all the stuff that good user acquisition teams are doing. Good user acquisition teams, they actually optimize ads, change images, change copy, all of the things that are table stakes, they're doing all of that. But, when you meet a great user acquisition team, they actually go a couple steps further. When they have an ad that's not performing or a channel that's not working, they start to answer the question why, "Why is it not working?" If I have a lot of engagement in this ad, I remember this happening at Postmates. We had a lot of engagement on iPhone charger ads. We knew iPhone users, high value users, retained very well. We also saw some of our best customers were purchasing accessories for their iPhones. We'd take some ads out, worst performing ads we've had. The team, good team for user acquisition, they would change the copy, change the images, do a couple cycles of that, and then probably throw it to the side. A great team looks into the product, they understand why is this happening, and turns out, didn't have item search at that time. People actually wanted to purchase these things, they literally just couldn't find it.   [0:13:48] PJ Bruno: Oh, they just didn't have the means.   [0:13:49] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, they couldn't find it in the product. They didn't realize that they needed to search for a Best Buy or an Apple Store, and then go and find the charger. Yeah, what's the team do? They do a quick test, they actually pull together a very proof of concept item search for this specific ad, takes you right to the item, becomes some of the best performing ads. It's like, that's what a great team does, but without that frictionless curiosity, if those people on that UA team actually had to ask a data scientist or an analyst, "Hey, what's going on with my ad?" They probably would have never gotten to the bottom of it. But, with that frictionless curiosity, they're able to actually help transform and build a better product.   [0:14:35] PJ Bruno: So, Amplitude quite literally facilitates teams asking questions.   [0:14:40] Tanner McGrath: Yeah.   [0:14:40] PJ Bruno: Because otherwise, you might not have the means to go inside, and actually dig, and see what's going on.   [0:14:45] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. I'd say that it elevates the level of questions that people are actually asking. One of my favorite Einstein quotes is him saying that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend the first 55 minutes on actually figuring out the question that he was trying to answer. Last five minutes just answering it. I think that that's really what I mean when I say "frictionless curiosity," is being able to actually ask the right question. The first question you ask is never the right question. I hear people asking me all the time, "How did that experiment perform?" That's not a real question. No one should ever ask that question. "What was your hypothesis and did it actuality accomplish your learning objective?" Usually, that's the 10th, 20th question that someone asks, so without that frictionless curiosity, the right questions never get asked. You see this at scale with companies, and the whole organization is asking better questions, and that compounds over time. Instead of taking 20 questions for you to get there, you're now asking that two questions away from the actual right question.   [0:15:52] PJ Bruno: And I guess you just get better and better as time goes on.   [0:15:54] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, something people often miss is that this concept of learning actually compounds over time, just like interest. The more you invest in it, the more you invest in your team, the better your team's going to be over time. The same with your product, too.   [0:16:13] PJ Bruno: That's good stuff. I gotta remember that. Throw away the first question, because it's no good.   [0:16:18] Tanner McGrath: Just make it smarter.   [0:16:20] PJ Bruno: All right, cool, let's get into some final thoughts here with you. As tech evolves, companies often pivot their main focus based on innovations in the competitive landscape. We've already talked a bit about competition here today. Do you see a new frontier for Amplitude to expand into?   [0:16:37] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. The way I see the space playing out is that today, really smart people leverage Amplitude to get to causal inference, to really understand what's [causaling] their product. I think tomorrow, we'll be able to help do that a lot faster, so that anyone can do it, or maybe it's done for you. On top of that, that really enables, when you understand what's causal, especially for different people, different cohorts, that really enables this emerging space of personalization. I think one of the biggest challenges that's often not talked about, related to personalization, is "How do you do the analytics for personalization?" If everyone gets a different version of your product, how do you actually make sense of that?   [0:17:21] PJ Bruno: Yeah, that's a good one.   [0:17:22] Tanner McGrath: Yeah, I think Amplitude's got a whole new landscape to build out there, and that's really the future.   [0:17:30] PJ Bruno: Yeah, especially because personalization is quickly becoming the norm. If you're not using that, then your message is getting lost in the sweep, right?   [0:17:39] Tanner McGrath: Yeah. Helping people understand how to do that at scale is something that is definitely needed, because there's a lot of teams experimenting with personalization, but very few teams actually understand it.   [0:17:52] PJ Bruno: You guys are set up to provide the right analytics on personalization, on real times, on all this stuff?   [0:17:58] Tanner McGrath: Absolutely.   [0:17:59] PJ Bruno: Al light, well, I'm excited to see what's next for you guys. Tanner, thanks for joining me today, buddy.   [0:18:04] Tanner McGrath: All right, thank you. [0:18:12]

Our very own Kevin Wang, VP of Product, sat down with me in our San Francisco office to discuss some of the recent SaaS IPOs (Zoom, Slack, PagerDuty) as well as the latest emerging channels and what the future may hold.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hey again. Welcome back to Braze for impact your MarTech Industry Discuss Digest. I have with me a very good friend today. Kevin Wang or Kevin Wang. Both are correct?   [0:00:28] Kevin Wang: Both are correct enough. I like it pronounced right, but I also like it spelled right and so we can go with either.   [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: That's W-A-N-G for all you listening. This is Kevin Wang on Kevin Wang, VP of product at Braze. I'm so glad we finally got to do this man. This has been a long time coming.   [0:00:43] Kevin Wang: I know, I know it. Really excited to be here.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: Well, we're kind of coming off MAU. Both of us are a little bit tired, but we needed to get ourselves together for this. The communications episode, some sass IPOs that went on in April, all around communication. So our first up is Zoom. Now I know, Kevin, this one was a really interesting IPO for you, right?   [0:01:04] Kevin Wang: Yeah. Zoom, I think it's fascinating. So in addition to just being an incredible business, I think one of the things that's really neat about zoom is the fact that they've been so successful. Essentially just literally building the proverbial better mouse trap. It's the thing where they already had a really powerful captive audience that's actually growing, in a large way as remote work continues to get more popular, where we've got all these folks who need to do video conferencing and the existing tools, I mean, we've all used them like a lot of the tools out there, just not that good. And Zoom literally just they knew all about the system. A lot of them are ex Cisco folks and they looked at the situation, just said, "We know how to do this better." And so, I think that, as a product person and as someone who thinks a lot about how we build products and how one makes products, I think there's a very strong pull in the industry to try to be completely out of the box, off the wall innovative. And I almost say, "Air quotes, innovative." With the idea of people wanting to build things that were never seen before. So let's look at a company like SpaceX, like reusable rockets. There's not a cottage industry of reusable rocket launch and orbital delivery products out there. And zoom looks at it from a completely different way. It would be like if they were looking at Honda civics or something like that, and they were like, "We can just build a Honda civic that's like the same price, just 20% better." In what way is it better? "It's just better." And I have a huge amount of respect for that because there's already that huge market there, and they knew exactly what they want. You just do it better. And delivering on that I think is really impressive.   [0:02:39] PJ Bruno: Right. I mean, do you think that also makes them equally vulnerable for someone to come along and create a Honda civic that's 40% better or?   [0:02:48] Kevin Wang: I think it isn't. So I've read a bit about zoom, especially in the wake of how successful their IPO has been because you look at the numbers, it's pretty eye-popping and at least in their case, they actually had a lot of knowledge of the space at a very, very high technical level, but also had the ability to execute really rapidly product wise. And I think that that was a huge advantage for zoom. And that's not something that's particularly easy to replicate. There are perhaps other teams out there that could do that, but it's not like there's tens of thousands of teams who could just try, and make a better version. So it's a very interesting, almost pure technology, defensible mode. Because one thing that's pretty common, I think, in the tech industry is that companies end up very able to defend their place in the market because they have a huge network effect and that gives them more data that gives them more customers. So Facebook, Google, they're both examples of doing this. In zooms case, that's not necessarily the game that they're playing. It's literally just knowing the problem and the technology better and then executing really, really well. A very interesting contrast to that would be PagerDuty, which is another one of these recent tech Ipos.   [0:04:00] PJ Bruno: PagerDuty, when I took a look at this outline, this is the only one that I didn't know. So PagerDuty, it has to do with pagers? It's bringing back pagers were going to go retro and we're...   [0:04:10] Kevin Wang: Yeah, they go out there and they just sell pagers just door to door and it's, they're really cool. There are at ease and all like wood and a little bit of gold plating.   [0:04:17] PJ Bruno: Bringing back the door to door salesman too.   [0:04:20] Kevin Wang: Yeah. It's everything. PagerDuty's business is that they essentially help an operations team for technical operations, running servers and things like that run better and they will page you in the old school sense. They will actually page folks saying, "Hey, this server, this system is down. You need to go in there and fix it." Because when we're talking about these really large distributed technical systems, you have hundreds or thousands of servers, they're running all sorts of code and the universe is just a big scary place. It's a big scary place to be running a lot of code and stuff breaks, things happen. And when it happens, you need to very often get somebody to go in and verify what's wrong or fix the problem. And PagerDuty just automates that. But the genius of Pager duty I think is that, often when these systems break, when these very complex systems, a server goes down, it can break in such a bad or catastrophic way that it can't even scream for help. And so there's a huge amount of value in PagerDuty, just literally not being you, the customer just running on their own system because that gives you that additional level of reliability. And additionally, they've done a number of clever things around how you actually run the responses to these incidents that can happen. And so PagerDuty in contrast to zoom is, is really playing more of the game of saying, "Here's how you run your operations better around your servers and your technology." Whereas zoom is just saying, "Hey, you want a video conference, wouldn't it be nice in the video conferencing was better?" And that in itself adds a lot of value and of course assumes that it has added a number of other features on top of it. But their core really did come from almost a very, very pure quality standpoint.   [0:06:01] PJ Bruno: Got you. So PagerDuty, effectively it's a third party flag razor. Right? And then it helps a little bit with the next step after the flag is raised. Like who needs to know what step is.   [0:06:16] Kevin Wang: Exactly. And they've got some other features there. I'm not doing either of these products, quite the justice that they deserve in terms of the different things that they've added on. But a large part of it is really that communication and inter mediating the communication between whatever is going on with your servers and your team who are actual human beings who need to actually make a decision or take some form of action.   [0:06:41] PJ Bruno: Something that I found a little strange as I was doing a little research on Zoom. They're whole thing that the CEO talks about his happiness. He just keeps using it in their pitch happiness, happiness. He says delivering happiness is what we do at zoom. And that just tells me nothing about the product. I love amplitudes, we help companies build better products. Just like these taglines that are like really removed from what actually is going on. I love happiness, don't get me wrong.   [0:07:10] Kevin Wang: Yeah, it's a great thing.   [0:07:11] PJ Bruno: It's a good thing. But I'd love a little more information. A nice tagline that's really buttoned up and putting it a little boat for me.   [0:07:19] Kevin Wang: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think if anything just says something about the state of brand marketing today that really, really enormous visions play quite well in a lot of ways. I mean, just look at car ads. I mean, if you look at a vehicle ad for like a Lexus versus how somebody actually buys a car, it's so completely detached, because people buy cars off of spreadsheets, they buy them basically off of spreadsheets. But the car ad is like, this is the lifestyle represented by whatever vehicle it is that their marketing, it's also like the same lifestyle for all of them or the same two lifestyles. Sunsets on the highway or just like in the mud, and this thing works in the mud.   [0:08:07] PJ Bruno: I think my favorite one is the Lincoln commercials with Matthew mcconaughey.   [0:08:11] Kevin Wang: Oh those are incredible.   [0:08:12] PJ Bruno: Those are great. Right? And it makes you want to hang with mcconaughey because he's being all like, "I was driving a Lincoln way before I was paid to drive one."   [0:08:19] Kevin Wang: But the incredible thing is, I am convinced that that's actually what hanging out with Matthew Mcconaughey is like. These commercials...   [0:08:26] PJ Bruno: Jumping into a pool wearing all of your clothes, an amazing three piece suit.   [0:08:30] Kevin Wang: This is like, he does that like twice a day. Like that doesn't even own a shower. Just like, "I just jump in my pool. It's just a great day."   [0:08:38] PJ Bruno: So the next one here, we have Slack. You want to open up on this one Kev?   [0:08:42] Kevin Wang: Yeah. Slack is again, phenomenal business. These are all phenomenal business.   [0:08:46] PJ Bruno: Phenomenal product, I live in it. I live in Slack.   [0:08:49] Kevin Wang: The amount of time that I've spent in Slack, I mean, we set this time up in Slack. It's so pervasive. I think one of the real challenges I have with Slack though is just that, Slack has some of the properties of email. Like I have something to say. I take that thing I have to say, I sent it to you and it's in a place where you can find it, but just the volume of traffic that goes through Slack, warps it into a completely different beast. I find this isn't maybe the most flattering characterization, but I think of Slack as almost like a screaming river of voices that's constantly flowing by you and occasionally you hear your name and you stick your head underneath the water and you just hear even more voices and it's madness. And then if you walk away, you don't know even what flowed past you, "Did I miss something important? Did I miss nothing important?" I think this is one of the real challenges of modern life speed of modern life, speed of electronic communication and Slack is not necessarily causing that, but there are certainly privy to that transformation and reduction of attention spans and all of that. But on the other hand it's really effective. It's really efficient. I rarely look at Slack and think, "Wow, this is impeding me from doing something." And so I think that their future is incredibly bright. They just need to figure out a way to help people manage the world in which they were created.   [0:10:15] PJ Bruno: I think you're right. I think we just need that layer of like how to manage Slack and not get lost in it. But yeah, I think it's also since the barrier to initiate conversation is way lower. It's just like the simplicity of it, that makes the communication volume much higher. And then the importance of the message is often decreased. I mean, I send plenty of messages on Slack that are not that important. To me, I chalk it up to culture ads, giving kudos to someone, like making someone feel comfortable. Giphy obviously like...   [0:10:51] Kevin Wang: I love Giphy.   [0:10:51] PJ Bruno: I mean, what an amazing creation that is.   [0:10:53] Kevin Wang: Yeah. Genius. Something like printing press.   [0:10:56] PJ Bruno: I know.   [0:10:56] Kevin Wang: Exactly.   [0:10:57] PJ Bruno: [crosstalk] get better please. But yeah, no, I mean, but at the end of the day, it's just a matter of convenience. And because it is so convenient, it's just so easy to put your time into it. And earlier I liken it to the Jewel, right? As opposed to smoking cigarettes, you need to walk outside, you need a lighter, you need to light that up and the jewel and vapes have made it so easy to just smoke wherever you are. And usually it's fine to be indoors and so you're doing it a lot more. And so I think there's that pendulum swing, when it moves to the left, as it moves to the right, it gets more and more convenient and it makes your life easier but at some point you're utilizing it so much because you think that convenience makes it more available to you to use as often as you want. And so then you use it, maybe when you don't actually need it.   [0:11:47] Kevin Wang: Yeah. I completely agree with you. And I think one of the interesting things with Slack is that, it doesn't devolve to madness because of the tool itself. The tool is just the tool and it's a high quality product. It starts this descent into madness because of social constructs or more broadly the lack of social constructs around Slack. Because I mean the way that I view it as, we're all still mammals using this product Ed. We're all still just social animals, but all of the restraint that comes from not wanting to just go and tap someone on the shoulder and bother them and look at the look on their face of, "Who are you and why are you tapping me?" Like that just completely disappears in Slack. I mean, one of the things that I almost wish you could see in Slack was in a large channel, I wish you could just see that face of every single person that a message was about to go to because I think that the range of nonessential communication that goes on there would not be nearly as broad as it is. I mean, it's the equivalent of going into an auditorium and just tapping on the mic and say you declaring some large funny Gif to this entire audience, nobody would do that. And this ties into something else that I'm really excited to chat about, which is this idea of when we're looking at these new communication methods, when we're looking at these new channels, how do we actually decide, or how does one know what's going to be successful and what's not going to be successful? So this is a question that we ask at Braze. All the time on the product team. We're a product that crosses many different channels, many different ways of reaching end users or customers of a particular brand. And really our raison d'etre, our reason for being, is very much to help to bridge that gap and allow brands and their customers to have these much tighter, more personalized, richer experiences. But the question that we are constantly asking as a result is when there's some new technology announced like a magic leap, for example, something very next level augmented reality. What's going to make sense? And what's going to just be another palm pilot? And how do you time the market around these technologies to figure out where you're going to invest your time and your energy researching. And one thing that I always come back to, just from almost a first principle standpoint, is what are our brains actually evolved to handle? What are our brains good at? Because if we look back historically, that tends to be a major impact of the technologies that ended up succeeding. Humans are very visual creatures. So we like having really big TVS and we've just seen TV's get bigger and bigger and bigger because we like looking at stuff. I'm humans are also very auditory creatures like we speak to one another. That's one of our primary communication methods. And so that I think explains a lot of the success historically of radio now of podcasts and audio and things like that. And also to a lesser extent, we're also very tactical creatures. Like we have really fine grained motor control. That's how we can handle so much of the world's input in the business context is now handled via typing whether on a phone or whether on the keyboard of just because we have that control. And those are the sorts of trends. Those are the sorts of kind of universal truths that are going to continue to carry forward with us. Because we see now technology's changing so fast that within a single career, let alone a lifetime, you will see multiple technology waves crash and crest over you. But the brain and the raw tools and material that we're using to interact with these technologies is exactly the same. It's going to be the same now, it's the same with our kids and our children's kids. And so that is I think, a really strong leading indicator in terms of what is going to be successful and what is not.   [0:15:32] PJ Bruno: And so real is the idea. It's funny because it's an idea that's been around for a while and that's when our technology has far surpassed, the evolution of our minds and have like our social constructs. Now we're really getting into that place, aren't we? Where technology is going to exponentially be zooming past maybe what we're able to handle as human beings.   [0:15:55] Kevin Wang: Yeah, I think so. And as a result, everything that zooms too far is generally speaking, going to just not be that successful. And so I think part of the challenge that we have in the challenge that a lot of businesses, a lot of brands have, it's figuring out for your brand, for your use cases, what actually makes sense given that the raw materials of humanity aren't going to change. But everything that we can do to those raw materials is changing and expanding. One example that one of the engineers on our team likes to bring up is that, I don't know if you've seen the movie minority report? Minority report has the scene where they basically,[inaudible] yeah, that huge iPad. And Tom Cruise...   [0:16:34] PJ Bruno: Yeah paint the picture for us, for those of you at home who haven't seen the film, this scene.   [0:16:39] Kevin Wang: It's got Tom Cruise, he spends the whole time during the Tom Cruise thing where he alternates between looking really serious and looking like he's in a real rush. The whole movie, that surprised but hurried expression. Like you're bothering them a lot at McDonald's or something. And so there's this whole scene where they have basically a huge touch screen and it looks just incredible because it's flashing lights and it's flashing colors and like beeps and boops and people love that stuff. When I saw, I was like, "This is the greatest thing ever. I want it. I don't know why. I just want it." Like watching an apple keynote, like I want it and I've no reason for this. But suddenly this engineer at our team like to point out, I'm not sure if he thought this or he'd just read somewhere else, but I think it's a great salient point, is that nobody wants to go and poke a UI that's on the wall because nobody has arms are physically set up to just be stuck out pointing at stuff all day. Like that would just be an exhausting thing. And that's just a mechanical aspect of your arm, that like your arm is just not good at being fully extended or even partially extended for a long period of time with you standing up, especially without you getting really annoyed. And that's something that helps you predict something about technology. But you almost didn't even need to know anything about the tech. He didn't even need to see it. You just needed to know about like body position and purpose.   [0:17:57] PJ Bruno: What does it take physically to use it?   [0:17:59] Kevin Wang: Exactly. And it's the same reason that there've been jokes about like smellovision TVs forever, but no one cares because like human beings have a terrible sense of smell. Like this is why dogs are but men or women's best friend because dogs are really great at smelling, they're really good at tasting things and deriving information from that, their auditory range is fairly different from ours. So they can pick up on different cues than we can and as a result smell is like a useless thing to us. There's no iPhone for smell. There's not going to be, in my opinion.   [0:18:31] PJ Bruno: Probably not.   [0:18:33] Kevin Wang: Let's hope not. That'd be gross.   [0:18:36] PJ Bruno: What about touch?   [0:18:38] Kevin Wang: Yeah. I think touch is a really interesting one. Like your brain devotes a pretty decent chunk of its size to touch and management of touch. But I think what's kind of interesting about that one is that these very fine grade motor skills are something that you can learn and you can adapt to. Like, everybody I know who first got a touchscreen smartphone a little bit later on in life. Everybody liked that, struggled with it initially but was able to learn it because I mean, and I think that maybe this is getting a little too Scifi fantasy out there, but I think it's literally just because in an evolutionary sense, if you weren't able to, as a cave person, learn how to use very fine grained motor skills and train very fine grained motor skills that was like just not good for your overall evolutionary prospects. And so we all in the modern world retain that and we're really, really good at that. But I think that what's interesting with touch is that we're ultimately somewhat limited in that we can only gather so much data out of a particular situation because something like reading or hearing allows for much, much faster structured information input. Which is why those are the two channels which have just by far outclassed everything else in terms of the overall interactions.   [0:20:02] PJ Bruno: And so I mean, for the sake of getting Scifi fantasy, because I know you like Scifi and I do too.   [0:20:08] Kevin Wang: Of course just pass me the fourth. So very timely.   [0:20:13] PJ Bruno: So I mean obviously we're not talking product roadmap, we're not talking about what's on the future for Braze product. But when we talk about data inputs, like once you surpass the channel or the device I mean, is it like physical augmentation like chips and like to contact lenses? Is that the next for the way we are going to be receiving our messages?   [0:20:41] Kevin Wang: Yeah. So my own personal belief is that some form of onboard augmented reality is the future in the sense of being the next step for displays. And that just comes from a few core beliefs. And this being a potential logical conclusion from that. So the first one is that at any given point in time since basically the printing press and even before that, any visual communication method has been really, really important. So we've got printing press, you've got newspapers, TV, books, computers, smartphones. This is just a way of engaging in information that is really, really popular with people. This is obvious stuff.   [0:21:23] PJ Bruno: Right. Groundbreaking.   [0:21:25] Kevin Wang: Yeah, exactly. People like their eyes. It's like, not really changing anything now, but I think what's also interesting in terms of being very relevant to AR is that the way that people, that a lot of the capabilities that will be possible, I will hope, with augmented reality, add new dimensions to that and accentuate the ability to which we can use vision. So, two of the main ones are that, so you can imagine more sophisticated augmented reality systems that track where your eyes are looking because the actual amount of the actual area that's really tightly in focus of your visual field is very, very small. Relatively speaking. Most of it is peripheral, and it's not as focused in. And so augmented reality that's has the ability to take advantage of that. Because this is literally just more information into a system. And then the other thing that I think is interesting is that we tend to find experiences that are broader and take up more of our peripheral vision are more immersive. I mean this is why people still go to the movies. This is why people care about like retina screens and just big 4k TVs. And so there's clearly an aspect of human sensation and perception that's drawing us towards those more immersive experiences. But the other thing around AR that I think is really exciting is that it opens up, and this goes to your question about touch, it opens up a number of really interesting use cases around touch because it essentially frees up your hands if your monitor is always on, and it's on your face, and it's everywhere. And so again, we're evolved to handle it very physical and visual world. And so you can now imagine that we can have experiences for like educational technology where kids are looking at something and learning about or even learning to read, but they can actually physically touch something. Like you learn what a rock is, and it shows you how to spell a rock, spell the word rock or the type of rock that you're looking at, but you can actually pick it up and that just gives you all these different ways to imprint that learning. And the other thing is collaboration. So like something that I think is really valuable in the future is, when we're thinking about a presentation. This is something that should be fully interactive and can be fully interactive with augmented reality. PowerPoint should be something where I can point and like a laser pointer comes out of my finger, and I point at exactly what it is that I want to show you or I could zoom in or zoom out. All of that starts to become possible when we're getting into a world where everyone's display is on them or just the fact that, I mean something I think we talked about the other day, is that just physically the act of pointing is trying to get you PJ to see through my Kevin's eyes and with augmented reality or certainly hypothetical future versions of it. That's something that becomes directly possible. You could literally see what I'm seeing, and I think that it starts to go down a very powerful and very interesting road. If I had to pick, I'd also say probably apple is the best suited to really make a lot of this reality just because apple stuff is always really cool. And people like cool stuff.   [0:24:34] PJ Bruno: That makes sense. And so I guess I got one final question for you and that is, is inception possible?   [0:24:41] Kevin Wang: I also can't tell if that's a facetious question, but I'll just answer it dead serious, which is that, I mean I think that the true Scifi future that gets people all excited and if you really want to get the tech crunch articles running, you start talking about like what Elon Musk talks about with neural links, and literally that company, I think it's called Neuralink that he started, or he's saying he's going to start. And I think that that idea of how close, how bare to the metal can we get in terms of communication, like digital communication and hooking it up to your brain. This is the obvious conclusion in a certain sense of your brain should just be able to be extended in a digital fashion. But just to bring it back. I think that aspect of things in many ways goes back to the human aspect and that the blending of humanity and technology, which is that, if you have a system that requires doing surgery, if you have a system that requires very invasive procedures, this is just not something people like doing, like people don't like necessarily going in and doing very invasive things to their bodies. Even for these shorter term forms of entertainment or even or longer term forms of communication. So it'll be really interesting to see where that gets bridged. I mean, I know people who don't use contact lenses because that's something that they just find to be an uncomfortable experience. So at what point does society change enough that people are willing to accept that? I don't know. And I think that that's a really interesting question around both pure technology but also around uses of technology. Like things like privacy and security. So to what extent does a generation, five generations from now where they have, not only have they always had social media, but everyone who they ever meet their entire lives has always had social media? How does that person view the interaction between social media and social technology and their lives? It's probably very different from us, and that in turn is probably very different from folks would have a hundred years ago.   [0:26:45] PJ Bruno: Kev, thanks for joining me on the communication episode.   [0:26:48] Kevin Wang: Thanks so much.   [0:26:49] PJ Bruno: You guys come visit us again? Take care. [0:26:51]

For International World Cultural Diversity Day, I was joined by many members of our EMEA team to share their experiences with culture clash. At Braze, we hope that sharing our stories will promote understanding and curiosity of cultures less familiar to us. The team wraps things up with a few tips when traveling through various countries.       TRANSCRIPT: PJ Bruno: My mom told me I was special as a kid and unlike anyone else. And I hope someone told you the same, because you are. Your unique in every way. And yet we're all the same. We're literally made of all the same stuff. But one of the things humans do best is trying to make sense of the world around them by identifying, and labeling, and comparing. And it's a thin line between taking into account someone's background to accommodate for cultural differences and making a sweeping generalization about a person based on their accent or appearance. It can be a polarizing topic to discuss where the world is going and if it's in our best interest collectively. While there is always more work to be done, we can at least recognize the boom of diversity and inclusion initiatives in the work place. Today we'll hear from our own people at Braze about their experience with diversity and the times they felt a rift between them and someone from another place. I started making my first European friends in my teens, and I didn't quite understand the kiss on the cheek greeting. Am I supposed to do it with people I just met? Do I do it with other boys too? How many kisses? Do I kiss teachers too?   [0:01:11] Speaker 2: So the kisses on the cheek thing is actually a really funny one for me because in Switzerland people give three kisses. In Germany, they often give two or they don't give any. And in the U.K. I found that sometimes people don't like to give kisses or they give one or they give two.   [0:01:27] Speaker 3: Well I'm quite posh, as you can probably tell from my accent. And Posh people kiss on two cheeks as well. But not everyone in the U.K. Does and I find there's a bit of a north south divide. So my fiance is Northern, and all his family and friends kiss on one cheek, but I kiss on two cheeks. And then we face this awkwardness every time I see them, because I want to be considerate of how they greet people, but they are being considerate of how I greet people. So then we end up in this scenario where I go for one and they go for two. So I actually just have abandoned kissing at all and I just hug everyone and I find it works. Hugging is the way forward.   [0:02:10] Speaker 4: I'm Swedish. And you know in Sweden we don't really kiss. People are kind of afraid of one another. I'm not sure, people might have seen there is this image floating around the internet where Swedes are waiting at the bus stop for one another and they basically stood two meters apart from each other. So I think the whole kissing on the cheek thing, that's not really common in Sweden. Personally, I'm a hugger, so you know people get a little bit like "Oh, whose this guy" when I approach them.   [0:02:42] Speaker 5: I mean coming from Brazil and having this affectionate culture obviously my first instincts is like I'm gonna hug you and I'm gonna kiss you. And usually it is a two kiss. So one on each side of the cheek. Depending on who it is. So if it is someone very close to me I might go for full on kiss on the cheek rather than just putting side to side faces.   [0:03:06] PJ Bruno: We're lucky enough to have a collection of cultures at Braze.   [0:03:09] Speaker 6: I'm half Irish and half Italian.   [0:03:12] Speaker 7: I feel British I am British, but yet I'm of Indian heritage.   [0:03:17] Speaker 4: Being from Sweden.   [0:03:19] Speaker 8: Being a German when I move to Mexico.   [0:03:22] Speaker 9: Growing up in Scotland.   [0:03:23] PJ Bruno: Everyone of them with a different understanding and expectation of the social code that mediates all human interactions. The fact is most of us mean well and want to have positive connections with one another but sometimes our intentions don't get through. They can be obscured, different cultures have different expectations of professional behavior and if you're not careful you could find yourself offending someone unintentionally. I got the opportunity to talk to some member of our London team to hear about their experiences with culture clash. Our hope is to dig into some of these stories to provide some more understanding, and hopefully more understanding makes for better connections.   [0:04:02] Speaker 3: I think that the biggest learning curve I've had at Braze is working with different cultures, when I work with the sales team and they hand an account over to me, it's like one of the first things that we'll talk about is what kind of culture are they, because in APAC, if I'm working with someone who's based in Singapore or they might be based in Thailand or if they're based in Israel you know the Middle East they're all going to be so different to work with. For example, typically in Asian cultures they're very polite and won't speak up in a room. So I've had with some clients a hesitation to even introduce themselves in a room, it's been interesting because we're up in the office there. I've been getting some tips from the team about how to work with customers there and one of the tips that Sam - who's an account manager out there- gave me was that Asian culture love to talk about food and it's very central to their culture. So apparently if I'm struggling to get clients talking I should try and talk about food, like "Hey I've heard that the food scene's amazing in Singapore, where do you get the best chicken satay?", because that's like a big dish out there, and so probably that's a good tip. I guess when I'm working with Israeli's I've found it a bit of a culture shock because they're very direct and in British culture directness can sometimes be a sign of rudeness, but for them that's just the way that they work and they want to get stuff done, so I think there's an element of me understanding their approach to business and not being offended by it.   [0:05:33] Speaker 7: I think diversity inclusion is a big buzzword, if I look back I've been in sales twenty years, I know I don't look it, but it's true. And if I just look back at my last company there was a lot of older men and I think in sales, when you don't have a diverse range of people then the thinking can be one way. You know we've moved on from selling the way we used to sell, on the phone getting people's credit cards or selling double glazing, you know the way they were thinking wasn't flexible or agile enough and because they thought they'd been doing it for the last 50 years. This is the process that works rather than looking to new ways of adapting.   [0:06:16] PJ Bruno0: In one of my previous jobs I was working closely with the engineering team. And there I struck up a friendship with a Russian guy, he was quite different and I think a lot of people first misunderstood him for being quite brazen. Because he just said exactly what he thought all the time and he would come in in the morning and he would just make some off the cuff comment and talk really loud and people would be quite offended. I think especially comparing it to the people who have been living in the UK for longer, who are a bit more quiet, a bit more composed. And he would just say really funny things that would rattle people at times but that was just his character. I kind of liked that about him because it was a bit refreshing. As the weeks went by that he had joined the company, people started understanding that was just his cultural background as well and it became a bit of a joke too like, I bet he's gonna make a joke about this or that. It was a nice addition to the team at the end of the day.   [0:07:20] Speaker 8: Germans are always on time and they stress themselves a lot to be on time. Let's say if I'm about to run late I would not necessarily run over a red light but I would stress, if that makes sense. That is not good on your health and for so many other reasons it's not really nice, but it results in people being on time and being time efficient. Coming to the UK, not that they're really delayed or people just show up 2 hours late, but they take their time and a tolerance of 15 minutes is absolutely acceptable. I picked that up here because I quite like that, because even if you run late you don't stress yourself, you still take the next tube to work or whatever and coming back to Germany makes me feel really stressed all the time, because people just stress for no reason, like my mum she's working half=time and she would rush home and there's nothing waiting for her. If I'm queuing up in the supermarket and somebody is taking too much time to pay, here in the UK people would just be really patient and wait, whereby in Germany people would be like why can't you pay faster and whatever. I shouldn't really talk so bad about the Germans.   [0:08:43] PJ Bruno: Speaking of cultural differences, I did all of these podcasts in London this morning and only the German woman was direct enough to tell me that I had salad in my teeth this whole time, just great.   [0:08:56] Speaker 9: Growing up in Scotland in an Italian household, I would behave in quite an Italian way, I think, without realizing it, to my Scottish friends. So something that's really common in Italy is to be very honest but in a nice way. I'm quite direct but again in a nice way, not in a confrontational way so it wasn't unusual to say to someone, you look awful today, you look really tired, you look really really tired. But in a really nice way as in are you okay?, is there something that I can do to help you (laughs). You just don't look yourself, what's going one, but someone did turn around to me and, I won't use exact words because we're recording, but did say is it because I look terrible today and I said no no I'm just really concerned about you. That offended them.   [0:09:53] Speaker 6: The first time I went to a physio in London, it got really embarrassing because in Italy it's normal when you go to see a doctor or an osteopath or a physiotherapist to take your clothes off. The physiotherapist left the room and said okay I'm going back in 2 minutes just get ready and lay down and so when he came back I was wearing just my underwear. He was like oh no please can you put your clothes back on. And then I find out that in the UK it's not needed. (Laughter)   [0:10:28] Speaker 5: I have one of my best friends, her name is Flo.   [0:10:37] Speaker 8: So one of my best friends is Brazilian.   [0:10:39] Speaker 5: We used to struggle a little bit with some of our cultural differences.   [0:10:42] Speaker 8: In her culture it's quite normal to ask a question several times because people might not feel comfortable saying yes. Say like you offer a snack or a dinner or whatever.   [0:10:53] Speaker 5: In Germany, from my understanding, when people give an answer that's their final answer. Whereas in Brazil being the persuasive kind of Brazilians that we are, we don't take a no for an answer.   [0:11:05] Speaker 8: In her culture it is polite to say no initially and be asked again, in Germany it's the opposite, if you say no and you get asked again, people get pretty annoyed for the reason for example of like didn't you listen that I just said no.   [0:11:19] Speaker 5: It's just because I really want you to be part of whatever I'm asking. So let's say tonight like lets go out and have a drink, oh no Pria I'm tired. Oh but come on let's just have one drink, no Pri I've already told you, oh but just one come on it's Thursday. She's like Pri I said no, and I said but why, what else you have to do?   [0:11:38] Speaker 8: That was a friction in our friendship but we addressed it quite nicely by stating where we're coming from in terms of in my culture it's that way and in her culture it's that, so let's just try to work together.   [0:11:52] Speaker 4: I've been in London now for the past nine years and I guess I'll be perceived as very non Swedish, so going back to Stockholm this must have been 4 or 5 years ago and I met with a friend and we went to a bar. I was going up to the bar, it's busy I'm ordering and while we're waiting there I'm waiting to be served I look over to my right and there's a bloke there, he's also waiting for a drink, waiting to order, so just out of nowhere I say hey how's it going how's your night? And he just looks at me like why are you talking to me. Because again going back to what I said earlier Swedes don't really take well towards strangers coming into their circle and disrupting their groove. So I think that I actually properly offended him, he looked at me big eyes and then just turned away.   [0:12:44] Speaker 8: When I think about an experience that has shaped me quite a lot and thinking about diversity was when I was roughly 20 years old and I moved to Mexico for 3 years. The thing that I found most shocking was when they tend to say things making other people feel comfortable as opposed to actually meaning it, that could be as let's meet up on Fridays and hang out, but then they never really follow up and me as a German I took that really seriously. Just to give you a concrete example, I organized a dinner, invited a couple of friends, of the friends that I made there, they basically never showed up. Living in the culture for another 2 years I really learned how to deal with that and in that scenario, if I had to relive that situation again I would make sure to remind them a couple of days before. Like a confirmation and continue the conversation and that's one thing that really struck me and almost was quite painful, because having set up the dinner and people not turning up that was quite weird at the time.   [0:13:50] Speaker 5: When I moved from Brazil to Portugal I was about a month into the country and I was in school so just like hearing people referring to other kids as putos, it was interesting to me, because in Portuguese and I guess in many other languages, when a word finishes with an O or with an A it means that an O is a masculine and A is a feminine. So there's me there in this group of friends, acquaintances at school and I thought to myself, why not try to be Portuguese about it and show them that I am actually, you know guess what I'm getting to know your culture and I want to use your words I want to use your sentences. So I start to tell them my story and I wanted to refer back to my past when I was a small kid and there was me hearing this like all those putos, and obviously putos means a boy. What did I think immediately, oh when I was a puta forgetting exactly that puta actually means the same thing in both languages , well in both accents lets say in Portugal and in Brazil. But it was very embarrassing because everyone started looking at me and I had the whole innocence on me to refer to myself as a kid, but using the female version of puto baputa without thinking of the actual meaning of it. So it was very embarrassing, everyone just looked at me.   [0:15:20] PJ Bruno: What's the meaning of it though?   [0:15:21] Speaker 5: Prostitute.   [0:15:22] PJ Bruno: Oh Okay. See I don't speak either language so.   [0:15:27] Speaker 5: Can this be on the podcast?   [0:15:28] PJ Bruno: I think so, I'll try to work it in.   [0:15:31] Speaker 5: Okay.   [0:15:32] PJ Bruno: So you referred to yourself as a prostitute.   [0:15:35] Speaker 5: Exactly.(Laughs)   [0:15:40] PJ Bruno: How can we dig deeper to find out what someone else's values are and what they see as acceptable and familiar. Pellegrino Ricardi cross cultural expert encourages us to ask anything as long as it's with curiosity. Step 1 ask a simple question Step 2 listen to the answer, pick a word and follow up on that word. The only caveat, this will only work with people who are from cultures that like to verbally express themselves. How do you greet new people?   [0:16:10] Speaker 3: I like people to be really casual, I find the formality of meeting new people so awkward and I really freeze with small talk. I hate small talk and actually I think the thing I admire people in terms of the art of conversation is being able to talk about something other than the weather or where you're from or how you got into work that day. And I love it when people just bring really random questions into conversations like, if you were a color what color would you be. I mean it just can be so random but it catches you off guard and you actually find out more about people. I think on the first day it's always nice if you meet someone, or you meet a client for the first time just to be polite but then also get the conversation going around something else as well.   [0:16:52] PJ Bruno0: I think when I wanna include new people I usually just try to hang out with them a little bit. What's really nice in the UK specifically is that you just go to the pub after work, so I try to make an effort and invite people to come along to that. Usually that's been received quite well but depending on who it is, sometimes people are a little bit more shy and they don't feel comfortable doing that kind of stuff, which is fine as well.   [0:17:17] Speaker 4: A nice thing might be a little bit overwhelming, what I tend to do when I speak to someone is also to pull in others around me and sort of help that new person, to introduce them to the wider group and I think that comes back to what I said previously where some people might not naturally want to approach people, so to bring them into a conversation while sort of being there and safeguarding the communication. I think that's typically something that I would do.   [0:17:45] Speaker 3: I think just smile, honestly especially now I work the middle east territory and can you imagine it's really again male dominated. I'm working Israel, I work Dubai, you know these companies all have their own culture fit and I tell you what just a smile goes a long way. It just lets people know as soon as they see, that you're friendly you're approachable. It's a language that everybody speaks, no matter where they're from.   [0:18:11] PJ Bruno: Today is the world day for cultural diversity for dialogue and development. A sanctioned international holiday. The need for diversity and inclusion can take may shapes, but it exists everywhere. Our EMEA team would like to leave you with some helpful tips when working or playing internationally.   [0:18:30] PJ Bruno0: One thing that I would recommend for people visiting Germany or Switzerland is don't be put off by people who are a little bit harsh maybe or who are a little bit direct. Oftentimes it can be harder to make friends, if you let yourself get scared off by the first contact which might be not as friendly or as polite as you would imagine. But just be open to people, somebody doesn't react the way that you're used to that's probably got nothing to do with yourself, it's probably just the culture. Just make sure that you keep trying to interact with people and try not to take offence.   [0:19:14] Speaker 5: So [inaudible] could be not to wait for your turn to talk, because you might never get the chance to speak.   [0:19:19] PJ Bruno0: No just talk.   [0:19:20] Speaker 5: Just if you have something to say just say it.   [0:19:23] Speaker 9: Also touching, touching is [inaudible] it's not unusual when you see someone to rub their arm and be like hi how are you   [0:19:33] Speaker 5: Or you want to get their attention while you're talking because you want somebody to listen more, you would grab his arm.   [0:19:40] Speaker 9: Yes, just give them a wee hit.   [0:19:44] Speaker 3: So I'm going to give my tips for the UK and I think the number 1 thing in the UK, which we're known for is queuing and you really just have to get that down. If you come from an Asian culture where queuing, you might see a picture of it and there's 100 people and it's like first come first served, get in there. If you try and do that in the UK, people will be pretty angry. But the other thing is that people are very un-confrontational in the UK so you won't get like a Hey Man This is My Place In The Queue, you'll just get a dirty look or even nothing, you'll just get a nudge, you know they'll get real angry. People don't like that.   [0:20:23] Speaker 4: Move out of your comfort zone a little bit because ultimately I believe that people are nice, just exposing yourself to other people that you don't know is hopefully going to open up a new world to you.   [0:20:36] PJ Bruno: Happy cultural diversity day, go learn about someone different.

Adam Biehler, VP of Partnerships and BD at mParticle, and Matt McRoberts, SVP of Global Alliances at Braze, join me in San Francisco to discuss the current state of the marketing ecosystem. Matt and Adam provide a brief history on the evolution of data platforms and the shift toward customer-centric strategy.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello again, welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech Industry Discussed Digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm also with two titans. Adam Biehler, VP of partnerships and BD at mParticle. Adam, how's it going buddy?   [0:00:32] Adam: Great, how you doing there PJ?   [0:00:34] PJ Bruno: I'm doing real well. And also our very own Matt McRoberts, SVP of global alliances at Braze. Matt, thanks for sitting down with us buddy.   [0:00:41] Matt McRoberts: PJ, always a pleasure.   [0:00:43] PJ Bruno: And now here we are a week out from MAU. How did it go all-in-all Adam, you felt good about it?   [0:00:48] Adam: Yeah, it was definitely a fire conference this week. Not a fire festival, though.   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: Right. Not a fire fest, let's not confuse those. You guys were the presenting sponsor, right? That's kind of a big deal. That's the top-top.   [0:01:01] Adam: Yeah, yeah I mean ... You know, we want to make sure our brand is associated with some of the more up and coming businesses for consumer experience, right? And from our standpoint we look at, you know, the attendees of MAU and ... Really just the thought leadership that comes out of that conference as blazing a path for mobile and for what the next generation of the day-to-day and how we as individuals interact with digital technology and devices.   [0:01:31] PJ Bruno: It was buzzing in there, man. There was a lot of great energy. And also as the presenting sponsor, what are the perks with that, is it dinner with Diplo, did you get anything, do anything?   [0:01:40] Adam: Oh, you're looking for that type of perk.   [0:01:43] PJ Bruno: Fun times. All right well what this really is, this is a partner spotlight episode. So we're really eager to kind of like get into it with Adam and mParticle. Adam I'd love for you to just kind of like give us the backstory. Like I've heard a little bit about the Cats brothers, how you guys are kind of forging the way with CDP. I'd love to hear a little bit about that story, what took you guys here.   [0:02:01] Adam: Yeah. I mean I think that the team here all kind of come from the same belief system around, you know, a couple core aspects of what's going on in the industry today. Data is kind of at the core of everything. What we're also seeing is as cloud and SAS are just continuing to manifest themselves in multiple capacities from like, an application standpoint, that the number of silos that get created just continue to proliferate. And so we've got, you know, a team of people that just believe that business users should be able to take advantage of this wealth of customer data to create competitive advantage; as opposed to being in its place where they know they've got these tools that they potentially could be taking advantage of, but because of some of the past investments or legacy investments you may have made, you're actually more hamstrung and you're watching other businesses that are smaller, more nimble, just pass you by. So ultiMattely, kind of simplifying all that. It comes down to like we want to empower business users to take advantage of customer data they have access to, and we want to allow the developers and engineers of businesses to focus on the core competencies of their business, not worrying about building and maintaining integrations, which are, you know not necessarily the core of their business.   [0:03:10] PJ Bruno: Right. Just Band-Aids all the time.   [0:03:12] Adam: Yeah.   [0:03:13] PJ Bruno: Was that the vision pretty much from the start?   [0:03:15] Adam: I mean, again, I think like even when you look at us in day one we were mobile-centric and, you know, really most of our customers were only doing things on mobile at that point. And, you know, people talk about all the other use cases and, you know, [inaudible] and all this stuff. And it's not about that. It was about the ability to collect customer data for our customers for their ability to collect their customers' data from the place that's as close to the customer as possible, and the most relevant, and to use that to power marketing with great tools like Braze,. And the story is evolved because the channels have evolved. And, you know, web has always been there, but we saw the next generation of customer experience really stemming from mobile. And so you see a lot of investment around OTT and voice. And so all of these other places that, you know, are the next generation, the modern customer experience that we want to be delivering.   [0:04:03] PJ Bruno: It's an exciting time and people are finally starting to catch on, I think.   [0:04:06] Matt McRoberts: Yeah, no, they very much are. Very much.   [0:04:09] PJ Bruno: So Matt, this article you wrote recently "The Six Pillars of the Ecosystem", is there a reason that data and infrastructure is number one? Was there a method to the madness there, or?   [0:04:19] Matt McRoberts: Great question. And Adam addressed a lot of the rhetoric. It's like the idea of silos and keeping your data beholden to different legacy systems. It's prohibitive to really the times of transforMattion. It's now about speed to market, speed to insight, speed to business value. Where CDPs have assumed this position within the new ecosystem it becomes quite critical. Because what they allow in concert with the Brazes of the world is this idea around agility, and agility, it obviously is synonymous with speed. Being able to be agile and focused and democratize that data across all those systems. So if anyone's putting together an ecosystem strategy, they have to look at "How do they standardize data?" "How do they break down the silos?" "How are they able to pump that data into the key parts of their business?" And I think the place, the position, the power that CDPs provide is quite impressive in terms of where they sit today in this ecosystem.   [0:05:18] PJ Bruno: And last we spoke you mentioned about us being in a wash of data. And I guess a CDP could be number one because you need to get that stuff in order, you need to clean house.   [0:05:26] Matt McRoberts: Yeah, I mean think about the integrations, the depth of integrations that a provider like mParticle is going to need to promote. You know, you've got ad ecosystems, you've got martech ecosystems, you have proprietary data warehouses. And to be able to, again, is get that data to work together in concert so you can get to market faster, you can uncover insights, drive business outcomes. Without that layer within the ecosystem it becomes quite difficult. So you can see, like, you know Adam and I joke quite a bit, is the legend and lore and thought leadership and content that is come ... It's a brand new category, it didn't exist, right? And so I think it shows just how quickly this idea around breaking down silos becomes the future is here, and it's now, and we're in a wash of data.   [0:06:17] Adam: Yeah. It, I mean, putting a pin in some of this, like what the CDP ... The Brazes of the world in today's ecosystem are enabling, it's instead of building your business based on what, you know, the technology that you've decided to use, unlocks for you, it's more about build the customer experience that you want to deliver. And then, you know, work into the technology that supports your use cases. So it kind of flips the paradigm for how you actually think about what's important to your business. Not just tech for techs sake, it's tech because it supports an outcome that we know we want to go deliver. And, you know, I think, again, it's all about data, so [inaudible] CDP, CRM, whatever acronym you want to use, I don't care. Let's talk about what you want to do and which tools are going to get you there. And there's always going to be a great tool that can get you there. You know there's this notion of foundational CDP which is where ourselves and a couple others in this space play, and yeah, I think essentially it, again it kind of comes down to we're never going to have an application. We're all about making it super easy for business users to take advantage of data associated to a customer. Because that's what unlocks true business agility.   [0:07:22] Matt McRoberts: Spot on.   [0:07:22] Adam: I talk about customer data agility as a big aspect of where, you know, we help businesses kind of put this foundational piece in place that they now can respond to changing consumer behavior and not have to go, you know, unpack you know, twenty years of legacy investment. They are able to operate nimbly, kind of on top of their stack and bring in the technology that's going to get them to the next generation of growth and compete with, you know, a startup that doesn't have that legacy investment. Like, I don't care what the acronym you want to use is, like what are you here to do? Right. What's the job you perform? What are you unlocking for the business, and it's infrastructure. Some of the guys in the CDP space tend to say that like they've got built in modeling and use cases. That's great. I mean are you really unlocking agility or are you just solving a point application for somebody? And that's a lot of what we say. You know, are you focused on the right systems, the right outcomes for the business that's like ... That's what it all starts with, so let's not talk about tech for tech's sake. I'd kind of just like to get away from that in my perspective. Ecosystems are important because there's so much technology but, you know, they've got to be the right partners and they've got to be the right use cases and the right outcomes that you're trying to drive.   [0:08:29] Matt McRoberts: To Adam's point, being consumer, customer-focused, business outcomes focused, you hear about the retail apocalypse, you hear about disruption, you hear about transforMattion. And then just the associated fear mongering around that, I think we all get our fair share of subject lines that are quite startling in nature, you know, every category is under some massive disruption. And I think with any disruption comes opportunity. And I think, to Adam's, is helping customers understand and educate themselves on these literally new age paradigms around the idea of an ecosystem. I mean we've long talked, I loved Adam's point around what's the acronyms come with a tremendous amount of equity, and they also come with a tremendous amount of debt, right? CRM, right place, right channel, right time, has been around for generations, right? Decades. People have been talking about the construct of what CRM really is. I think Adam hit it on the head is like you can't deliver against that in days of old. Batch data, not in the right channel, not orchestration across channels. And now you have this expectation, especially from the consumer, is like there's all the importance of getting it right, but there's also the importance of getting it wrong, as well, as we will all talk about experiences as consumers, as well as business professionals, where we feel the experience was broken. And Adam hit it on the head. If you're data strategy is standardize, is uniform, is agile, then you're just inherently going to be able to deliver against these higher expectations with, as it relates to consumers. And so I think there is fear, right? It's like we've all seen the social amplification of a poorly executed campaign that consumers will again, is will very much put you out into their domain and talk about what went wrong. There's the idea of the death of retail and how over-pronounced that is. The evolution of direct to consumer brands, is like all that can be quite startling and scary to the traditional marketing organizations. So I think the opportunity for, that I think is incumbent upon out organizations, "How do you educate customers in a really powerful way?" "How do you make them feel informed, derive insights, so that they can start to make the best decisions, the best investments?"   [0:10:54] Adam: It's an interesting dynamic, too. Because, you know, as we look at just how this all plays out, you know. There is so much noise. And, you know, our opinion on all of this is like, we've got to just cut through the noise. Like we're going to help these businesses understand that this is not a threat or a risk, this is actually your opportunity to take your business to the next level and become the leader. It's' a competitive advantage, if done right. And so from us it's about how. We all know, that everybody wants their customer 360. You've got data silos, that's been around forever. The reasons are because the channels continue to proliferate. The platforms are continuing to proliferate. So what do you need? You need to have people that have really good understanding of the data that powers these different pieces, and great technology that can scale with your business, and then that can help you get to the end state that you want to get to. Label it whatever you want to.   [0:11:42] Matt McRoberts: Now it's a really good point is where CDPs have assumed a position of prominence is in the fallout of DMPs, right? Like [crosstalk]   [0:11:50] Adam: Take us back there.   [0:11:51] Matt McRoberts: Yeah, and like Adam, I'll kind of borrow from his story, right? Like see whether it's customer data platform or see whether it's customer relationship management. Like customer's at the forefront of that, and I think where DMPs lost their way was third party data. The world has very much calibrated around the power and the prominence of first party data. And I think, the idea of probabilistic models, that it's like "Ahh, I think maybe PJ is this person?" Is very much moved into this idea of really deterministic, and like the lifeline of that is literally around first party data. And so whether it's a CDP or a, you know, a new-age CRM tool like a Braze, is the literal lifeline is the ability to leverage first party data and it's been startling to see how quickly the concept of a DMP has distilled away into, again, the power of a CDP and again the juxtaposition is the data set. Like, how do you start to really leverage first party data, as opposed to make assumptions off dated antiquated third party data, which was historically the foundation of the DMPs of the worlds.   [0:13:01] Adam: The stakes if you do it wrong are just too high at this point. Like we talk about CX and customer experience, you know it definitely starts there. And that has business impact. But when you start talking about, you know, compliance and regularity impact and how you market to customers. And you look at GDPR and CCPA and just [inaudible] that's not going to stop either, right? So, again, when you kind of talk about the customer ... Centricity aspect of it, you have to have data at the core of how you build your business. And DMPs, they just didn't have those challenges. And again, they were great, and they still have some very applicable use cases. Not going to say like, you don't need a DMP for a lot of things. Like there's a lot of things they do do really well, but they weren't built to give you a framework for how you associate customer data to a user profile and to dynamically be able to use identities that are those customers that are provided in a compliant and regulatory safe way, with your first party marketing systems. It's' a very different challenge. And they're also not built in a way where it's like "That's going to change again". Like, what you got today is absolutely going to be different six months from now [crosstalk], twelve months from now. And so, do you want, yeah, kind of like your insurance layer, to a [crosstalk]. You've got to future proof, right? That's the move.   [0:14:14] PJ Bruno: Right on.   [0:14:14] Matt McRoberts: Yeah, no, I mean picking up on that, you know the kind of ongoing compliance environment is again is that in itself to be scary, right? Because it comes with the consumerization of that. There's a more pronounced understanding at the literal consumer level, right, like I know "Hey listen, as a consumer I want to be sensitive to what type of data is being tracked regarding me." And then you have this regulatory fear that if you get it wrong is like there's tremendous fines associated with that. So I think that kind of fear mongering, you can flip that and make that empowering and how do you help enterprises understand this ongoing onslaught of compliance evolution. And how are we all good corporate citizens to advance an all boats rise philosophy. We're dropping it.   [0:15:00] PJ Bruno: Dude, you guys are just firing shots across the table right now. So since we're in the way back machine a little bit here talking about DMPs, Adam I'd love to hear a little bit more about ... You know, what brought you to mParticle? Some of your time at MuleSoft, how did that world compare to this? Even like, three or four years ago, it seems like it was an entirely different business, right?   [0:15:18] Adam: Yeah. I mean if you look at even, yeah, probably the last eight years at this point. If you go back, this notion of you know, API led approach for how connectivity is accomplished for businesses, you know some companies were thinking about it, APIs were starting to be more proliferated in the ecosystem, but you weren't seeing the rapid adoption, you weren't seeing standardization around how people build APIs and all that. So, you know, we'll go back to that world where, you know, there's a lot of on premise technology and it's very much the world we still live in. So when I say go back, this is very much ongoing. I came from a place where as an operator I'd actually, I was doing a little bit of the marketing, we were 25 people, I was doing some of the sales, I Was doing some of the post sales. And I'm working across our marketing autoMattion system, Amarcetto, and then I've got Salesforce. Again, this is like almost pre-MuleSoft at this point. We've got ZenDesk for case management. And so I'm thinking about all these things, and, you know, I'm 24 years old, kid out of college, I don't really know what's going on here. I'm like "There's got to be an easier way to get the data to flow versus me manually sitting here." Fast-forward a couple years, I'm at MuleSoft, talking to these companies about how the challenges they have at scale, like you're an enterprise you have, you know, 50,000 people that are using employee management systems, Legacy SAP on prem ERP, right? You might have a custom database from IBM. And those challenges are very very different than the world we live in today. That challenge still needs to be accomplished. Nobody's ripping out those, you know, billions of dollars of investment where your data sat on premise and you've fell like you've got, you know, the right level of control over it. But you need to be able to augment that and compliment that. But I look at MuleSoft and you know, I think that they were kind of paving the way for what customer experience can be today, and they still do, right? Like they are helping businesses that have traditionally been very much kind of these on premise oriented businesses that didn't have a digital presence, you know, digitize their offline assets and you know make them available to the cloud through APIs. And what ends up happening is now you have a new breed of developer in the world. And the developers of today can take advantage of the assets that are in these systems that a 21 year old kid out of college would have no idea how to go program against this on premise system, to build a new cool cloud app. But because you've got these APIs that are exposed from the back end, you can now start doing that. Use that data to expose new applications. You know, fast forward a couple of years, you start thinking about "Okay, well there's this next generation of what is the customer experience connectivity challenge look like?" Because the proliferation of all the on prem systems and then these SAAS systems in the platforms that are actually where customers are engaging, it's the same kind of variation in terms of like where data's coming from, where data needs to get to. But the differences now we're thinking about it from a very customer-centric perspective. It's not about just developer re-usability. You know there's a, absolutely a place where [inaudible] compliment a company like that. Like, they're not even in the same space from this standpoint. Like, I know this better than anybody. But I get asked this all the time. Like, they're an unbelievable company and where we think about it it's about "Okay, how do you take it a step further and break down the customer data connectivity challenges?" And so insuring that the integrations that you're unlocking are oriented around the notion of a customer.   [0:18:27] PJ Bruno: It's just, it's just as silly to talk about customer centricity as kind of a new thing or like a pivot for companies as a focus. But ...   [0:18:36] Matt McRoberts: And that's been our thing, we've been saying that for years now, haven't we? You know that's been our-[crosstalk]   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: I remember the first breakfast we had, it was like week one. Talking about customer centricity.   [0:18:45] Matt McRoberts: It seems so [crosstalk] two point, it seems so simple. Yeah. Literally our first breakfast talking about, we're BD guys, like how do you help kind of effectively, again, build an ecosystem strategy manager channel. And I thought, you know I'll give Adam the credit. It was like "Hey the lens should be what's best for the customer." Everyone wins. That's the reality. That's what's driving this growth. This kind of constant evolution of tech and kind of where it sits is like if you run it through the lens of the customer, you know, provides a natural north star, a natural compass for success.   [0:19:15] Adam: Yeah, otherwise we just make our own consumer experience shit. [crosstalk] Frankly, right? [crosstalk] Like the term CDP sounds big, it sounds scary, you know at the end of the day it's not about the acronym it's about the outcomes you can deliver for our company. And like [crosstalk] we just, we think about it very much from that standpoint. And ... You know everybody can build software today. Like, there'll be another CDP tomorrow that's claiming it. It's not about that. It's about what're you here to solve for the customer, you're here to unlock the ability to take care of data. That's ... That's what we're here to do. You know I think we've kind of blazed the trail in terms of how for this next generation of consumer facing brands they can do that. Buy you've got to start small, too.   [0:19:55] Matt McRoberts: I think you're right, though. The idea of transforMattion is a journey. It's going to be measured, and it's like it gets back to your point around agility, is like the concept of a platform allows you to fail face to iterate SAAS just inherently, because it's high growth, it's sell sell sell. But you also have to be quite realistic in terms of some of these transforMattive agendas are three, four, five years long. They're being driven by a new age services organization [inaudible] management consultancies, the next iteration of SIs. And I think you're right, you know. Again, I'd go back to that customer centricity. But being agile, being realistic, helping people to make those right decisions. Because you're right, if it's about understanding a CDP it's not the right dimension, it's about understanding how you can make your business more flexible, more agile, in these transforMattive times.   [0:20:46] PJ Bruno: Adam, Mattt, thanks for being with me today.   [0:20:48] Adam: All right, thank you.

At MAU 2019 in Las Vegas, we set up our Tell All Zone for members of the martech community to give us their confessions. Hear about the biggest mistakes they've made as well as what they learned along the way. Bill Magnuson (CEO and founder of Braze) and Mike Molinet (COO and founder of Branch) give their insight on the need for mistakes and making them a foundation for growth and agility.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hi. Welcome to brace for impact. I'm your host, PJ Bruno. This week we brought our mics out to Las Vegas for MAU 2019 at MGM Grand, and we were able to gather some confessions for this weeks episode, when shift hits the fan. When you're running a marketing campaign, it's like having a global megaphone at your fingertips. The power of hitting launch, and communicating with hundreds of thousands of people at once can't be undervalued. However, that power can also be terrifying. One fall step can have far reaching impact on customer engagement and faith in your brand. But making a mistake is a hallmark of what it means to be human. So, the sooner we can embrace the idea that mistakes are a given, this sooner we can perceive them as what they actually are. Opportunities for growth. After all, true innovation isn't possible without taking a risk. The following are a series of confessions from various employees in the Martec community. We've given them a safe space to share some of their blunders and the learnings that came along with them. These are their stories.   [0:01:23] Speaker 1: So, I'm Dante Ledbetter. I'm the senior marketing manager at Fintech company. One experience that is really sort of embarrassing for me was, so I was running a campaign, and you know there's like first name personalization where you can sort of test it and see what it looks like with your name in it. And I accidentally put my fist name in an email and sent that email with my first name to about 3000 people. So, yeah that was pretty horrible.   [0:01:53] PJ Bruno: So, you called 3000 people Dante.   [0:01:55] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, essentially. And My coworker...I actually didn't know about it but my coworker got the email and she was like "hey, Dante" I'm like "what, what?" Luckily...   [0:02:09] Speaker 2: So, my name is Beth. I work in product marketing for a tech company that makes API's. I messed up last year when I sent out a press release before it was officially approved. I had sent it out for a time and a date that we had previously agreed on before there were changes that came down from the powers that be. And so, because I didn't change the time and the date, guess what happened? It went live. Not the end of the world, but I got a little hand slap. Always double check your times and your dates.   [0:02:42] PJ Bruno: Always, right?   [0:02:43] Speaker 2: Always, always always.   [0:02:46] Speaker 3: So, my name's Will Cracker. I run our customer experience team at Braes. To protect the innocent, PJ, I hope you understand I can't use names here, you know?   [0:02:56] PJ Bruno: It's an admirable thing that you're doing, I appreciate it.   [0:02:59] Speaker 3: It's important. A customer decided to send out...have you ever gotten a test notification from internally at store   [0:03:08] PJ Bruno: Sure, with the brackets "test" in big letters?   [0:03:11] Speaker 3: Now, imagine if you were the person in the company that accidentally sent that out to, I don't know, forty or fifty million people all at once. That's one horror story I've seen, where we've had tests go out and push notification to the entire user base of this major media brand. And of course internally we're all like "oh God, this isn't good. Like they're going to be really upset" but low and behold it was really funny because this brand actually came back to us and we were like "we're so sorry, we're so sorry this happened. What can we do?" And they're like "actually it's all good." We're like "what? Why was it all good?" And it turned out it was their best performing campaign of that half of the year because so many people engaged with it because they were like "what the hell's going on? This is weird "Test" from this company? Are you kidding me?" And so many people clicked on it and engaged with the app that it actually worked. The take away from that one is that, you know so many times, so many brands out there are just like so afraid of tweaking their customer experience a little bit, or tweaking their branding or tweaking the way they talk to their customers and that just shows that, especially in a one off basis, you can get away with a lot. You can get away with just really coming out of left field and trying something new and different and really standing out from the crowd matters. Should you use just the word "test" to do it? Probably not, but uh...   [0:04:28] Speaker 4: I'm Maddie. I am an associate communications director at a mobile shopping app. Okay, so it's hard to choose just one over the years, but one that definitely sticks out is a dormancy email campaign that we were sending to people who lapsed after 45 days I believe, and we had a server side bug come up where the campaign started triggering over and over again for our dormant users and the subject line of the email was "First name, did we do something wrong?" And we literally sounded like a psycho ex that was hitting people up over and over again. We sent it to some people I think over a hundred times in a row. So, it was just like "Maddie, did we do something wrong? Maddie, did we do something wrong?"   [0:05:21] PJ Bruno: Did anyone respond "Yes".   [0:05:23] Speaker 4: Yeah   [0:05:24] PJ Bruno: You had a lot of those?   [0:05:25] Speaker 4: Oh like social media, everybody was posting it and they were like "yeah, you are doing something wrong, like leave me alone. We didn't feel like it was appropriate to send more emails to them apologizing to them, but we apologized to the app itself and gave them a little extra bonus in there and said "our bad, we didn't mean to sound so crazy there." It doesn't hurt to put some additional safety guards on your campaigns, so frequency capping for example, you might not thing that it's going to trigger a lot of times within a small period of time, but it happened so, Coding in any liquid and putting on some filters just to allow for some buffering in those situations that you don't necessarily expect is something that we learned from that. So, adding that to more campaigns moving forward.   [0:06:09] Speaker 5: yeah, my name is Donald and I'm a CR Manager for a delivery service app based in Austin Texas called Favor and we had a bit of a fun snafoo in the last 6 months with a little Q/A targeting issue with a push campaign before where there was a campaign that was supposed to be going to people who had received another campaign and the filtering got flipped and it actually went to, was targeting people who did not receive. So, we're talking you know, a 50K audience turned into about a 600K audience. So luckily though the campaign was pretty generic and would have been open to any of our customers regardless, but we definitely lost out on some of the learnings from the campaign that it was supposed to be targeted to on the incrementality side, but it was a good learning on just with all the 10-20 campaigns we're trying to launch in a day, make sure you meticulously look at each on in the filtering for sure before you're hitting launch, so.   [0:07:08] PJ Bruno: Was the engagement decent on it?   [0:07:09] Speaker 6: I'm Adee. I'm an engineer turned sales engineer. So, the first time I was at an event my boss told me that we should probably get some customers to eat dinner with us and it was my first event, first time talking to customers, wasn't an engineer before and I was like coming up to people, talking about my company and asking if they wanted to go out to dinner, and I approached this girl and I said the whole shpeal of this is what we do, if you want to come for dinner and she was like thinking that I'm hitting on her and just ran away.   [0:07:43] PJ Bruno: Jesus. And so what was the big learning moment from that. What was the take away that you   [0:07:49] Speaker 6: not to ask people for dinner.   [0:07:54] PJ Bruno: Do it in email.   [0:07:57] Speaker 7: I'm Cody. I sell software at a fast growing company. I guess the time I had a blunderous mistake, one that really really sticks out to me is y young and early in my sales career, which was I guess just 4 years ago, I was working in consulting prior. Just got in, moved up to San Francisco, got a job, thought I was really ready for this. 2nd day on the job we were tasked with leaving voicemails, you know just giving the pitch. And they've pretty much curated this list of people that were surely not to answer the phone, you can leave, you can you know just run free on this and just, you just give a great pitch. And of course I go in a phone booth, get the call list, first guy I call, I'll never forget, I won't disclose the company but it was the CMO at a pretty important company for I don't know why the were on this list but, ring ring ring, hey this is Tyler, and I just completely froze and I actually thought I saw a ghost and I'm like "uh uh..." click and just hung up and I was so scared man. You told me this guys not gonna answer. And he answered sure enough and it was pretty PRST but my take away from that I think we talked about was 1)in life I just like to grab the bull by the horns I think honestly, I probably would have done a lot better of a job if I'd have tried rather than just hanging the phone up and next always prepare. Be prepared in this life and don't just, even if it's you know, in hind sight I think I could have done a little bit more instead of them telling me what to do, I think I could have don't a little bit of work on my own, and maybe just not hung up like an idiot.   [0:09:39] PJ Bruno: So, do the ramifications of a mistake vary depending on the product? Kevin Wong, VP of product at Braes offered me some of his insights.   [0:09:50] Kevin Wang: I think one of the really interesting things about product is that you tend to release things with a lot more early pre thought going in them, I think than say like any mail newsletter. Like, everyone knows if you're sending out a newsletter, you write this content pretty frequently. Or if you're sending out like a particular promotion, you're probably running a lot of promotions, and so it's bang bang bang and these things are going out fast. Whereas for product, you know we release fast, we build quickly, but there's a lot more pre thought that goes into it. And so what that means though is that when a mistake comes out, if there's an issue, in the court of public opinion, you're just not standing on the same ground that you would have been with that newsletter with the weird typo, where you know, hello--first name because you know that email is a femoral but that product, you got a while to look at this, like everyone kind of knows that in the court of public opinion that you are thinking about it going in. And so, and the other thing is that when the wrong communication goes out, that communication goes out there but, but then its' gone and it's sort of you're already in that mode of it being a little more femoral and it's already in your past once you see it. As opposed to a product where its like that's just sitting at you, you know all buggy not rendering right in front of you, and so I think back to some of the times earlier in my career, no names to protect the innocent, but you know those times when you launch something and everything looks good for a few hours then you get that phone call in the middle of the night and when that phone call comes in, you know you see who it's from and you just know that you're not good enough friends but they want to hang out. You know what's coming before you even pick it up. Before you even look at the text and what could be really fun about a deep product bug or like a deep engineering bug, especially a rare one is that like finding a weird leak in your house or like finding out that you know the sewage system in your house is having a problem where you know what the problem is, you can see the symptoms really obviously, but like what's actually going on, I don't know. Gonna need some gloves and a wrench and we're just gonna have to kind of figure this whole thing out an night, and so it's a different sort of exciting sort of problem and of course it comes with the business, but I think that the main thing that you learn is that each mistake that gets made, I mean something that they say often about senior engineers is that like all senior engineers have seen a lot of stuff and over time I think you just get that osmosis and that wisdom and you sort of become the old grisold lion on savanna that's just seen so much crazy crap happen that you can kind of see around corners.   [0:12:31] PJ Bruno: So, the more mistakes we see, the better equipped we actually are to trouble shoot problems in the future. My high school soccer coach always used to say "you learn a hell of a lot more from losing than you do from winning." I sat down with tech founders, Bill Magnuson of Braze and Mike Molinet of Branch to hear their thoughts on mitigating risk and the merits of error.   [0:12:53] Mike Molinet: As a founder you guys know that things go wrong all the time and that's pretty much what your job is, to fix all those things and catch them. Especially when you're moving really quickly. I'd say one of the most probable ones was in late 2014, early 2015 when we were still relatively new and still ramping up, we had a small team, and we were starting to scale and started to close some big customers, but our infrastructure couldn't really handle them so we were constantly going down, constantly apologizing and then going and putting things back up. I remember one day we were about maybe 10 employees and a large customer went live and it totally took down our entire infrastructure and we were just sitting there, you know 3 people, trying to figure out what the hell to do, how to get this thing back up. We had a guy, and engineer who's still with us, who was interviewing at the time and we had him break out his laptop and help us troubleshoot in the middle of the interview, trying to get the infrastructure back up. We ended up you know, getting through it and I think there's a number of learnings that came out of that. One is things are always gonna go wrong and as long as you move quickly to fix them, that's okay. 2nd, try, you're gonna move fast but try not to hurt your customers too much or take them down with you. But I think the 3rd that really came out of it afterwards was, people are okay and accepting of issues or bugs, or challenges as long as you take ownership over them. As long as you work quickly to fix them and resolve them and are honest and transparent about it and I think that was one of the biggest things that we did, which was we took full ownership over it, we were honest and transparent about it and we apologized and we told them exactly what we were going to do to prevent it in the future and people actually value that a lot, vs. if you try to hide or you try to blame someone else your or don't tell them.   [0:14:37] PJ Bruno: Right. Try to cover it up with something.   [0:14:38] Mike Molinet: Yeah yeah, people do not appreciate that, so it helped definitely rebuild the trust and I think we came out stronger in the end because of it.   [0:14:47] PJ Bruno: Bill what do you think, does that spark any thoughts on the early days?   [0:14:49] Bill Magnuson: Yeah, definitely, you know ours was really a story of starting to the learn the responsibility that you have when you have a really big system operating on the internet. We have a future called connected content and what it allows you to do is, when you're sending out a message at send time, we can reach out to another web service or 3rd party or a partner or something in our customers eco system and pull back content in real time to template into the message. SO we had a customer early on that wanted to use a translation service and they had you know, a pretty complex email that they were building out. They wanted to be able to translate different parts of it based on the you know, hundreds of different combinations of languages and locals. And when our system gets up and running, it sends messages very fast. It's what it was built to do and we actually in the process of sending this campaign, we hit the translation service so quickly that we took it down. And not only did we take down the API, but this poor company hadn't isolate their API's from their own website. SO we actually took their website off the internet. And you know this was a scenario where they also didn't, they thought they were under attack, and so it was like you said the transparency there and taking ownership over it. We reached out to them and told them what happened and we actually went back and modified the campaign but it was an interesting experience for us because we realized that the scale that we were operating at, we needed to be a good citizen on the internet, basically. We couldn't have our customers being able to point kind of the massive machine gun of our system at you know random services and potentially taking them down. And so we actually over time also then developed automatic backups. If we see a service start to slow down while we are using it, we will slow down. If we see a service start to respond with errors, we'll completely stop, take our foot off the gas. We'll alert people and you know its' not the only service we've taken down and we learn every time on how to mitigate that potential in the future, but it was definitely an interesting learning experience for us.   [0:16:50] PJ Bruno: Nice. Had to put up a lot of safe guards after that I bet, right?   [0:16:53] Bill: Absolutely   [0:16:53] PJ Bruno: That's a lot of power you're working with.   [0:16:55] Mike: That reminds me of a time not too long ago where we made an update to one of our link services and for a brief period we found that accidentally in some cases all the traffic when people were clicking on links was re directly to the branch website, which was great for our website traffic for you know, a good 30 minutes, but for our customers who were using   [0:17:14] Bill: Marketing [inaudible] through the roof   [0:17:16] Mike: Yeah exactly. For a specific type of link that redirecting was not so good. So, I think the lesson there learned was it wasn't an engineer that pushed the change, it was somebody else that modified the change and pushed it to get up and we rolled it out into production even though we had tested it, but we had to pull back really quickly. That was pretty fascinating.   [0:17:38] PJ Bruno: So when it comes to, I mean obviously you two, you guys have high expectations of your team and their performance. How do you balance that, like having those high expectations on a performance, but still creating that culture to where it's okay to make mistakes and realizing the merit of risk and stuff.   [0:17:54] Mike: Yeah, I think working in a fast paced start of up like ours you have to be okay taking risks, you have to take risks, you have to make mistakes and I'll tell you that no one makes more mistakes than me and my co founders, we make the most mistakes out of anyone. I think there's a couple things, those 2 things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, they you can really create an environment where you can have strong results and have good high expectations but also have a place where people are okay taking risks. I think there's a couple things that we do. The first is we try to set very clear expectations. So yo can have strong results but strong results really come from what are the expectations and are you meeting them. And by setting very clear expectations and also holding accountability, you can push people to really perform at a very high level, but when people do screw up, in a way you have to celebrate learnings, you have to celebrate the mistakes, you have to celebrate what went wrong. You have to make sure people know it's okay, you have to tell them it's okay. If you do need to correct something, you should do it private. This is something we've gotten a lot better at, not in a public slack channel saying "why the hell did you do this" but rather privately having a discussion and saying "what lead you to this" and also I think asking them how you can help them and trying to trying to actually understand why they made that decision, and telling them in the future, this is how I might think about it and I think that's gone a long way. Because I thin we've read a lot of studies and there's lot of studies about this but basically around the highest performing teams and the most common trait between them and it's psychological safety and having a place where it's okay to make mistakes and people feel psychologically safe, allows them to take risks and to move really quickly and to feel okay about making mistakes because if they don't have that psychological safety, they're never going to and you'll find that you slow down a lot and you no longer are iterating or innovating as quickly as you used to.   [0:19:40] Bill: And I think for us from high level starting point, one of our values is conviction and what that is, or the way that that comes into being is that it's a charge to, our employees that if they find that hey are not able to operate with conviction, that they, you know, raise their hand, they go to their managers, if they need a new skillset if they need new resources, if they need more training if they need better access to data, you know all of these are ways that kind of people get that confidence to be able to operate within uncertainty and a fast growing start up environment, you've got a lot of dynamic conditions, you've got a lot of uncertainty and you know that ability to follow through and execute on something and be able to take action and get it to the finish line, despite all that uncertainty and despite those dynamic conditions, I think is one of the few properties that start ups really have as a strength against established incombants that have much more scale like many more resources and I think when things then go wrong, you know it's important that everyone is able to understand that they were operating in uncertainty, that you know, we don't have perfect information, we can't always predict the future and we need to create an environment where you know we can approach those things and say did the process, you know, lets set aside the outcome, and let's set aside judgements about the outcome. Let's look at the process and the approach, you know, did the person that took the risk, did they do it in a way that was balanced, did they have access to the resources that would have given them a good chance at being successful and really kind of analyzing it from that perspective as opposed to only looking at the outcomes, because I think that you want people to be confident that if they've got the right ingredients in place, if they you know have that certain level of you know conviction or confidence, that they should be able to take an action in an uncertain environment and if the outcome ends up negative, that what we judge is the process and the contributions in the approach.   [0:21:24] PJ Bruno: Any final words to tech founders out there that might be starting off from the road that you guys have come so far?   [0:21:32] Bill: I mean, one of the things that I think about a lot, you know we're around 350 employees, we're approaching that right now. And one of the things that changes quite a bit as you go from the early days you know when you're, you've got a runway that's, you're fast reaching the end of it, you know you don't necessarily know where your next meal is going to come from and you've gotta just survive, is that in the early days, fragility in terms of not having redundancies in place is being really lean, being really efficient is the only option because you're competing against a landscape of other people that are willing to be fragile. But then over time what you need to do is understand when you need to shift from that to becoming and enduring institution and one with durability. And so an interesting, just a simple example is that having multiple people responsible for one thing in and early start up that's only 10 people could be the difference in your cash burn between you making it to the next financing round or not, whereas when you're a few hundred people, only having 1 person doing something is potential risk of the business because you've got too much key person risk there and knowing when you can actually accept those types of risks and knowing when you need to build an environment that is durable to them and making sure that you're making that transition at the right times as your company grows, I think is vital to being able to scale an enduring institution.   [0:22:52] Mike: I think that's spot on. I would definitely agree with that and we're approaching 300 and we're going through that right now. Some other things, I think 1, especially for founders, I think 1 biased for action, just always take action. Don't sit there and analyze things too long. Some momentum even if it's in the wrong direction is actually than not even starting in the first place, and then the 2nd thing to be aware of is you know, we're talking about starting a company that you start as a couple founders and then you grow to a couple hundred employees and what I've found is, as a founder if you, in the beginning you want that, you want to be big. You want to raise money, you want to have a bunch of customers, but really as you go through it, you actually realize a lot of it sucks and I think the most important part is you need to have the psychological, or the mentality oft you need to constantly be reinventing yourself as a founder because as a founder of 4 people or a 4 person company, you're job is very different that when it's at 50 people, which is very different than when you cross 100, which is very different then as you approach 200 and 300 and beyond, and so you not only have to change your responsibilities and what you do, you need to reinvent yourself and your psychology and your mindset and actually figure out what you enjoy doing, right, because in the beginning, I never had to do HR meetings, I never had to do one on ones, I never had to like sit with people. I just like was at my keyboard all day and same thing with Alex, right. He was coding everything. And as the company has grown, he's no longer coding, I'm no longer at my desk anymore. I spend all day in one on ones and with customers. Alex spends all day managing his folks, and so it's a totally different job and I think as a founder you need to be mentally prepared for that, where if you actually are successful, your job is going to be very different 6 months, 12 months, 18 months and years down the road and so just be prepared for that and always reinvent yourself as the company grows.   [0:24:34] Bill: Yeah and I think that at a meta level, as a founder and as a just a leader in general in a dynamic environment, what you need to do is be able to embrace the change for the changes sake as well. You know I think one of the reasons that I love technology and working in technology is that you're constantly solving new problems with new tools. You know you're able to kind of build on the shoulders of giants, like take new innovations, multiply them with your own creativity and drive and really drive toward and impact. And a growing company is exactly the same thing. You are getting new capabilities, new teams, new people, new specializations, new skillsets and you're able to go and solve new problems and it's exciting to be a part of that change. But you need to appreciate that it is in fact constantly changing.   [0:25:17] PJ Bruno: New teams and new tools will always breed new problems.but we can't let that fear of the unknown hinder our momentum or stifle our innovation. We must enter the void headstrong, prepared to reinvent ourselves as new frontiers expand far beyond our view. In a highly competitive landscape with constant advances intact. Playing it safe has become a more dangerous play than taking a chance. Just be sure it's a calculated risk and a documented result. We'll see you next time. [0:25:48]

Dan Head (CRO) and Robbie Matthews (Director of Integrations and Onboarding) join me in foggy Londontown to chat about the evolution of marketing, from old world email and DMPs to flexible architecture that is channel agnostic. Learn the nitty gritty of why new school tech is leaving legacy clouds in the dust. Dan also hints at a future of talking toothbrushes and Robbie shares his data dreams.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. This week, we're here in London, in our London office and I'm thrilled to have with me two close friends, Dan Head, Chief Revenue Officer at Braze. Hey Dan.   [0:00:33] Dan Head: Hey PJ. It's good to see you.   [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: And also, Robbie Matthews, Director of Integrations and Onboarding. Robbie, how you doing?   [0:00:40] Robbie Matthews: Good, how are you?   [0:00:41] PJ Bruno: I'm quite well. And I know it's a bit of a canned response, but I got to say, the weather's unbelievable here. I've been getting all this bad intel about bad weather and this is unreal.   [0:00:51] Robbie Matthews: You got a British tan?   [0:00:52] PJ Bruno: Yeah, exactly. I don't know how. I literally got sunburnt yesterday. It's ridiculous.   [0:00:57] Robbie Matthews: It's all lies. Fake news.   [0:00:59] PJ Bruno: Well, you know, coming into Easter weekend, how you guys feeling? Happy Easter, by the way. I don't know if you guys celebrate. Plans for the weekend? Any...   [0:01:08] Robbie Matthews: We tend to celebrate confectionary throughout the year, anyway. So, we can eat chocolate eggs this weekend, too.   [0:01:13] PJ Bruno: I notice in the lobby, there. You guys are loaded up. What we're going to talk about today, really, it's kind of like the evolution of marketing technology and more than that, we want to demystify a lot of the things. Because you hear a lot of snap terminology, a lot of jargon, but let's actually break it down and understand what we're talking about, using the facts. And, before we jump in, I love... you know, Robbie, I know you eat, sleep, and breathe data, or so says your girlfriend.   [0:01:42] Robbie Matthews: I thought you may bring this up.   [0:01:45] PJ Bruno: Yeah, can you just give us that anecdote really quick?   [0:01:49] Robbie Matthews: So, Dan's already smiling at me.   [0:01:53] Dan Head: I'm not familiar with this one.   [0:01:54] Robbie Matthews: So, I was sleeping the other day and I woke up and my girlfriend was just staring at me, like a puzzled face. I was like, "Why are you looking at me whilst I'm sleeping? Firstly, that's a bit weird." And she was like, "Do you realize what you've been talking about for last two minutes?" And I was like, "What you talking about?" She said, "Oh, you've just been sleep talking about, like, piping data into various places and where you should send data to, and this is how you send data." And I was like, "I need to get some better dreams."   [0:02:23] Dan Head: Need to cash in that brace therapy reimbursement.   [0:02:25] Robbie Matthews: Or she needs to find a new boyfriend, is what she needs to do.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: Well, that's her journey and that's for her to decide. But, anyway, I'm glad you were able to share that with us, thanks bud.   [0:02:35] Robbie Matthews: Thanks, PJ.   [0:02:36] PJ Bruno: Yeah. So, let's jump right into it. Best place to start, where we came from as far as marketing tech. You know, Dan, you're old. Why don't you tell us...   [0:02:48] Robbie Matthews: Everybody says that.   [0:02:51] PJ Bruno: But you still look so good. We were saying, "Tell me your moisturizer, because I need to get some of that."   [0:02:55] Robbie Matthews: What's a face care regime?   [0:02:56] Dan Head: I'm embalmed.   [0:02:57] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I just let snails crawl over my face every night. It's a beautiful thing. So, how do we move from email to the concept of a stack, or an ecosystem. Do you think you can talk about this a little bit, Dan?   [0:03:10] Dan Head: Yeah. I think it goes back to the perspective that businesses have had on just these technologies from the ground up. Historically, I think companies have looked at providing communications on channels like email as being a utility. You know, you set up a business, I need seats and chairs and desks. I need water coming out the taps and electricity. And I need a way of sending email. And, when the marketers have wanted to have these tools to communicate to their customers, they've asked the IT teams to provide this technology, and the IT teams have gone out and procured that technology. So, over time, a stack of tech debt has built up, if you like. By acquiring these utilities, acquiring technologies for these channels and finding ways to stitch all of that together. Which is, if you like, a ground up, let's just go get the bricks and build the house, sort of thing. But, unfortunately, the world's different now, because every year, CES throws millions of new channels at us, you know? It's connected wind screens, it's connected forks and toothbrushes and all sorts of other crazy stuff. And, businesses just can't keep acquiring channel specific tech anymore. It needs to be data centric, it needs to be customer centric. Because, all of us as individuals have got our preferences about how we want to communicate with brands. And so, now we're moving away from a utility plumbing based approach, to a customer centric data oriented approach. And, that is how, I guess, the modern concept of a vertically integrated stack has been born.   [0:04:55] PJ Bruno: Yeah. And, obviously there's these advances in technology, we're going way more mobile, right? But, there has to be those that are lifting up the torch and kind of pushing us forward. And putting that pressure on legacy, right? You called them the role models, yesterday.   [0:05:12] Dan Head: That's right. Because there are businesses that have been born into this new environment. When you order your on demand taxi, or you order your on demand pizza take-away, whatever, when you're looking for a date, these are technologies and services that haven't existed previously. They've been born into the device. And, you look inside those companies, and the teams and the people and their KPI's and the technology, it's completely different from a legacy enterprise business. And, if those companies don't get customer orientation and data driven communication correct, it's an existential problem for them. They haven't got another business model to fall back on. And so they become, and this is why I see them as role models, they become role models for more classic enterprises. And, that would be my advice to any long standing enterprise, is to go look at those companies and see how they do it. It's a good place to start.   [0:06:10] PJ Bruno: Do you think they're actually, these bigger legacy companies, do you think they're actually interested in completely reworking their tech? Or does it feel like stitch up solutions to stay relevant?   [0:06:23] Dan Head: I think in big companies, big enterprises, I think there are a bunch of political reasons why it makes sense and it's safe to stay with the status quo, you know? If the CEO or CIO says we're going to do this one particular way and we've got our IT standards. And, I work in the CRM team and I know the tech doesn't work, well, I'm only going to have so much appetite to stand up against those folks because at the end of the day, I want to get paid.   [0:06:48] PJ Bruno: Right, right.   [0:06:48] Dan Head: Right? But, I think at some point, and I appreciate the political importance of standards and doing what the bosses say. But at some point, the political importance of customer experience and the political importance of driving outcomes with those customers, I think, is more important than the politics of IT standards, and so on. And businesses eventually figure that out. It's just part of their evolution. And one of the factors that we see, which I think is a good indicator is, where businesses have taken the CMO role and the CTO role and then they've sort of adapted it. And now you see this emergence of the CCO, or the chief customer officer role, where the customer officer has got a greater stake and influence on tech decisions. Because it is literally customer oriented. That tends to be a good indication of that evolution is fairly well progressed.   [0:07:39] PJ Bruno: Yeah. You mentioned customer experience. It's funny that now it all kind of just comes back to that. It's like there's this strength in tech, but really it's ideating towards the customer. And so, my question, I guess, to you is, what is customer experience actually mean now?   [0:07:57] Dan Head: Yeah, just use some examples. We all use these role models, these new technologies, and so on. But, I'm reminded of a quote from Keith Weed, the current, or perhaps former, because he's leaving, CMO of Unilever, he had this expression, "You know, our job as a brand is to get to the future first, and welcome our customers as they arrive." And most enterprises-   [0:08:23] PJ Bruno: That's a great quote.   [0:08:23] Dan Head: Yeah.   [0:08:24] PJ Bruno: That's a strong one.   [0:08:25] Dan Head: I dig that one up a lot. Yeah, I like that one. Most enterprises, I think, are just trying to catch up with the current world. Let alone the future world, so just as an example: If I'm driving down the highway and maybe I would fancy a coffee. And let's say, the folks at Costa Coffee, this business acquired by Coca Cola, they want to send me a notification to say, "You're coming up on a service area and there's a Costa and you can get a deal on a cup of coffee there." Well, I'm driving, there's no point in them sending that to me on my phone. But, as we saw at CES, there are technologies like connected windscreens and there's more connected computing in cars now, anyway. So, there are opportunities for Costa to send that message to me on these new devices. Which would be a more appropriate way to deliver it. But, brands just aren't ready for that. Because brands are channel centric, they're not data centric, they're not customer centric. They're not able to make the most of these technologies as and when they emerge. And, as a result, therefore, they can't be customer oriented.   [0:09:31] PJ Bruno: Right. And since it's all about the customer experience, right, you want to make sure that you're not abusing that use of data, right? So, we live in now, this world, it's a wash of data, right? It's all over the place. It can be collected. So, why is effective and responsible use of data important to what you do?   [0:09:51] Dan Head: Yeah, I mean, of course we've had laws like GDPR and then there's going to be the California Data privacy laws coming in. And the world is realizing that this is... Brand connection with customers is about trust. And that comes through the responsible use of data. So, it's not that there are just new legislative frameworks, which make it law that we have to be responsible. But it's just the basis of good marketing, anyway. And so, the technologies that need to be adopted here, need to enable the marketer to use data effectively, at the right place, at the right time, to seek permission. And to act on that permission and behavior that is being granted and communicated by the customer. It's like a conversation. There have been studies, like the one Forrester released on the brand humanity index about the effect of, and the positive effect of talking to your customers in a human way. And what talking in a human way actually consists of. So, it's not just law and legislation that makes us a necessity, these are the ingredients of delivering positive outcomes.   [0:11:03] PJ Bruno: Right. A human touch is super important. And, now also, more than ever, the stack and the technology is really important. And I remember, you said yesterday, the term you used is, "Architecturally enabling", right? And so, Robbie, you're a little more on the technical side. So, from your perspective, from these role models perspective, even, what are the fundamental engineering building blocks that are architecturally enabling versus those that are somewhat prohimitive.   [0:11:38] Robbie Matthews: Yeah. If we start at looking at these traditional enterprise businesses, and typically they're built on relational databases as a foundation. And then we take an example of what Dan's mentioned of these role models, which are using document based storage as a foundation. We can look at what those are and then how they actually enable what you need to send to customers. So, firstly, just what is a relational database? It's essentially a storage of data that's organized into tables. And each of those tables has a very rigid, defined schema. And what you need to do with that, is be able index it, to be able to say, "Okay, I've got this data in one table, how do I join it to another data in another table." And Dan mentioned tech debt, earlier. And that's a big issue. So, if we take a client like Deliveroo, you can say, "Okay, what sort of data have they got?" They've got their user data, they've got all their purchase data. Maybe have reviews that they've left about you. Favorite restaurants. And that all exists in different tables. And as the landscape becomes more complex, you're going to only increase the amount of data you want about users and the environment they're operating in. And that's going to create tech debt. So, what does that actually mean for a brand, when you come to wanting to send messages and target and talk to your users in a human way? And, really, the first thing is agility. If you've got an ever increasing amount of data that you need to join together when you want to create a segment to target those users. That becomes a much, much harder piece to actually stitch those data tables together, access the data in a quick way and define the messages and the audience that you want to send to your users. So, what do brands actually want to do? They want to use that data. They want to define customer audiences. They want to send individualized messages based on any kind of behavior around a customer, like demographics, location data, contextual data. And as soon as you need to index all those tables, or predict what a customer is going to want to do with your platform, which is the tough thing. We can't predict what customers want to do, that changes every day, as new technologies get introduced. As breaking news happens, you're going to want a segment or an audience that we just can't predict. And as soon as you need to rely on the indexing and the schema to access that data, we lose the ability and the agility to do that, in such a rigid manner, which is what the databases in these relational databases require. So, how, I guess a MongoDB or document based storage actually solves that, is, firstly, it's a schema less database. So, we can define exactly how we want to structure data to support these customer requirements. Using documents, as opposed to a relational schema let's us model very complex objects. And then, due to the structuring of that data, we don't need to make those joins and stitch all the data together in this increasingly complex landscape. So it means customers can make a heap of customized segments, off the cuff, and really give them the agility to create these audiences, send out campaigns as they wish.   [0:14:57] PJ Bruno: And that's all around like free flow of data, right? Because, relational is a lot more stringent. It needs to be set up in a way... I mean, that's kind of what I'm hearing, is...   [0:15:10] Robbie Matthews: I guess there's two parts to that question. There's one is speed in the context of a database. And then, I think when you're talking about free flow of data, that's probably where we want to look at more around ETL processes and Kafka. So, maybe let's touch on the speed in relation to relational and document based storage and then we can come onto Kafka and ETL processes.   [0:15:31] PJ Bruno: Okay.   [0:15:31] Robbie Matthews: So, in speed... As you say, customers just demand customer engagement platforms to run fast. Customers demand it. If you need to send out a break in push, ABC wants you do that as fast a possible. And, really, that's about read and write throughput on your database. So, let's take an example where you have to, like in a relational database, where you need to make a number of individual queries, join different tables, and that could take days to produce the results. Whereas, a no seek with MongoDB style database allows you to run queries in parallel, break up your dataset, run higher number of queries, and get that data back almost instantly. So you get those audiences that you want to target much, much quicker. Yeah, so that's the speed element on the relational database versus MongoDB. The second part of your question about ETL versus Kafka and the streaming is, again, like, "How do I actually access that data, or upload my, data into my data warehouse?" Think previously, Dan mentioned utility. Like they way that brands store data has just changed. Various data from different DB's could be loaded into a master data warehouse, once or twice a day. And that's fine. However, let's take the example of Deliveroo. I don't care to admit how many Deliveroo's I order a day. But, they need to know if I've made two this morning, or one this afternoon. And they don't want that upload of data to happen 24 hours later. And to get told that I actually made three orders in the last day. They want to know about that as soon as it happens, be sent to them as that event takes place.   [0:17:19] PJ Bruno: Right, but you don't want to know that you've ordered three times in one day?   [0:17:21] Robbie Matthews: My waistline doesn't want to know that I've eaten three times in a day, but that's a different story.   [0:17:27] PJ Bruno: It's for another podcast.   [0:17:30] Robbie Matthews: So, ETL versus parallel stream processes. And, what that parallel stream processing does, is essentially sets up a queue of events as and when they happen. Then you can listen to those events, publish those events and then essentially subscribe and act upon those events as and when they happen. So, let's take an example of a train booking company, a UK train ticketing company. Where, if I make a purchase for a journey later today, in the ETL world, that upload may happen tomorrow. In which case, I've already missed my train. I've missed all of the communications around it. It doesn't help. In the Kafka world, as soon as that event purchase takes place, you, as a business can act on that purchase immediately, send information about when the train is, any delays about that train. And make sure that user has a good experience with your brand. But, like I said, in the ETL world, I've probably already missed my train because it left the station 30 minutes late. And then the data was only sent to you as a business, to act on the next day.   [0:18:34] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:18:38] Dan Head: This term, real time, I think is sort of used and abused and misunderstood. Like the examples that Robbie just used about travel, timing, of course it has to be real time. It has to be in the moment, otherwise, you're going to miss your train. You're going to miss your taxi, whatever. And, those examples apply to all other businesses, as well, right? Because again, this interaction between a brand and a customer, in order for that to be human, it has to be current. It has to be up to date, based on information that is relevant right now. So, as an example, let's say, I'm on the train and I'm on the way to work and I'm browsing for some sneakers on my mobile web, on my phone. And I add some things to my cart, but I don't transact and then I get to work. And I nip out for lunch and I actually go an buy those sneakers in store. But, maybe there was an abandoned cart email scheduled for 2:00 PM. And that abandoned cart email is still going to come out at 2:00 PM, it's not going to be cognizant of the fact that I went into the store and I bought those sneakers at lunchtime. So, that is a bad customer experience.   [0:19:52] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:19:53] Dan Head: Or, just to continue that example, if I'm one of those companies that does sneaker drops, and there's a limited amount of inventory at a particular location. The communications can and should be based on that inventory dropping, you know? Create that exclusivity and that need and that excitement, which is what the sneaker drop is all about. And, I guess what Robbie's talking about is, unless you've got a database structure that can make and broadcast, or make available data in real time elsewhere in your technology ecosystem. Unless that data's being distributed in real time, you can't enable those use cases and you can't satisfy that need for a good, premium customer experience.   [0:20:38] PJ Bruno: And the value of that is just less and less as time goes on, right?   [0:20:42] Dan Head: Yeah, exactly. So, I don't really want to know tomorrow that the sneaker drop inventory has run out, you know?   [0:20:50] PJ Bruno: Just creating the opposite of good experiences?   [0:20:52] Dan Head: Right.   [0:20:53] PJ Bruno: It's just frustration. I'd rather just get nothing, right?   [0:20:55] Dan Head: Right.   [0:20:55] PJ Bruno: I'd rather not even see it. All right, cool. Why don't we do something fun and round up with, I mean, you were talking a little bit, Dan, about toothbrushes that talk to you. I want my toothbrush to talk to me so badly. I have to just talk to myself at the time. But, what's the future hold? What kind of last words do we want to put out about, maybe predictions we might have, or a word to the wise about a good strategy, or just some advice to keep in mind moving forward.   [0:21:29] Dan Head: I think there's two angles, to look at it from a customer's perspective. Speaking about myself, I mean, there are always new devices and new technologies and some of us are going to be quicker on the adoption than others. But, as a population now, we are more tech savvy than ever before. More willing to try technologies more than ever before. We have an expectation of being delighted more than ever before. We're willing to kind of experiment and try stuff. And, from a brand's perspective, how on earth are you going to deal with that? So, brands just need to future proof themselves, they just need to be data centric. They just need to have the engineering horse power. They just need to have the developed muscle groups, the ways of working, the team structures based around what's possible with real time data. And then, whether it's that toothbrush talking to you, or the fork telling me that I'm eating too quickly, you know? Whatever it is, the brand can deal with that. And, I think ultimately, where brands are trying to get to, is there should be this ability to be creative and playful with technology. We shouldn't just be worried about the plumbing, "Oh no, I've gotta send a message on this channel now, rather than that channel because of this new device's come out." If we can use any channels, anywhere at anytime, based on current data, then we can really use that as a creative canvas for just amazing, delightful, surprising marketing. And, that's the kind of thing that we, as a population, kind of enjoy. We don't enjoy stuff that's irrelevant, we don't enjoy stuff that we haven't opted in to. But we are willing to be surprised and we are willing to be engaged if we think the brand is making an effort to do so.   [0:23:22] PJ Bruno: I love it. Robbie, you got anything?   [0:23:25] Robbie Matthews: I think that, I'll bring it back to the architecture, to Dan's point around what brands want to do. You want you customer engagement platform at the point you're ready to use sort of surprise and delight strategies that Dan's talking about in reaching customers. You want your engagement platform to be ready to allow you to do that. And not still be developing itself. And, the way its architected, and the way it's able to meet the marketplace's changes is going to be crucial. So, I mean, WWDC happens, Google IO happens, there's a heap of changes to how you can send messages to users. And your engagement platform has to keep up to date with that. So, how they're architected, how they're able to be flexible to meet the new abilities of these OS's, is crucial. And when you look at, again, going back to the sort of, if you want to make joins, create new tables, that's tough to do. And then you have to look back at your current architecture and work out how you stitch that onto the end. Whereas, we take this example of something like a push carousel, where you send a push and you can swipe through a number of images to that. That came out last year. And just the way we were architecting meant you're able to immediately respond to what is new in the market, and give the brands the ability to go out and use that, as and when they're ready.   [0:24:48] Dan Head: Yeah, and we've talked about food quite a bit here. Maybe it's because it's coming up to lunchtime and it's all on our minds, right? But, an example that just brings all this together for me, I think some of us have seen it, which was recently Burger King ran a campaign where they hijacked McDonald's branches and if you got within 600 yards of McDonald's, you would get a message on your Burger King app saying, "You can now redeem a Whopper for one cent." And it would direct you to the Burger King. And it was this cheeky, creative, just technology embracing campaign that got so much attention, they got to the top of the App Store. I mean, how crazy is that? That a burger app can be higher than Instagram and YouTube on the App Store. It's just-   [0:25:37] PJ Bruno: Well, burgers are future proof, Dan.   [0:25:39] Dan Head: They are. And, particular popular where you're from, huh, PJ? But what a great example of creativity with technology. That campaign wouldn't have been possible unless you had the technology in place that Robbie was talking about. And then, once you've created that surprise and delight, now you've got so many more people that are engaging with your brand, that have downloaded the app. And now you can really start to go and have fun with them.   [0:26:04] PJ Bruno: Totally. Well, Robbie, Dan, thank you guys so much for being here. And thank you all for joining us. Just remember Shift is happening. And Legacy Clouds, in the words of Dan and Robbie, don't miss the train. [0:26:17]

Longtime buddies Will Crocker (Senior Director of Customer Experience)  and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) chat the return of Game of Thrones, a ban on the government from creating free tax-preparation software, and a potential ban on crypto mining in China. Also, Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite?!        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me two very close buddies. I have Will Crocker, senior director of CX, that's customer experience. Hi, Will.   [0:00:32] Will: Hey, how you doing, PJ?   [0:00:33] PJ: And also, of course, my good friend Spencer Burke, the head of the House Growth. He's here with us today.   [0:00:40] Spencer: Hey, hey, it's good to be back.   [0:00:42] PJ: It is good to be back.   [0:00:43] Will: You guys grew a house?   [0:00:46] PJ: I'm just trying to rewatch more Game of Thrones, and I had that moment where Melisandre's like, "Robert of the House Baratheon." And I wanted to do something similar for Spencer, but I don't know if it hit.   [0:00:57] Spencer: PJ of the House Bruno.   [0:00:59] PJ: Exactly. Just makes you sound more special, I think.   [0:01:02] Will: So Game of Thrones is coming back real soon, right? What do you guys think?   [0:01:06] PJ: Oh, yeah. Sunday night. I'm thrilled. I'm gonna be in the UK, so I'm trying to find people there that ... For a watch party, because as you know, Game of Thrones takes place in England. Or so it may seem. I'm pumped. I'm so freaking pumped for the last season. Spence, any predictions?   [0:01:25] Spencer: I feel so far behind. I'm up to date, but my wife, Jenny, like you, is rewatching. She rewatched everything.   [0:01:33] PJ: You have to.   [0:01:33] Will: Everything? That's a lot.   [0:01:35] Spencer: Over the past couple months. Yeah. And so I'm going through, and I'm like, "All right, who's this again? What did they do?" And since she's been rewatching it, I'll come in at season four and be like, "Oh yeah, that's the guy who ..." And she's like, "No, that hasn't happened yet." And then when she got [inaudible], I was like, "Oh, but that's the guy who did this." She's like, "No, that was three seasons ago."   [0:01:54] PJ: Right.   [0:01:54] Spencer: So I'm just totally discombobulated, but I know once it gets started, there's the action, there's the dragons. We have a big battle coming. Gonna get straight into it.   [0:02:03] Will: Yeah, and you have a cheat sheet that's going to tell you what's going on in the new episodes.   [0:02:07] Spencer: Exactly.   [0:02:07] Will: Meanwhile, I am my girlfriend's cheat sheet, and I am in the same place as you, so I'm just gonna start making things up. I'm just gonna go out there and just say, "That's the secret Stark over there, that one. Just pay attention."   [0:02:21] PJ: They're gonna need to level up those recaps. That's gonna become a five to 10-minute thing of just, "Okay, wait, what ... There's all the sub-threads."   [0:02:30] Will: I'm actually shocked HBO didn't release a pre-episode which was a condensed, 30-minute explainer of what happened in the last season. They should've done that this week. They could've gotten a ton of views on that.   [0:02:40] PJ: Dude, tell me about it. I really ... I need something like that. I need-   [0:02:43] Spencer: That must exist somewhere. A supercut.   [0:02:45] Will: I'm sure YouTube has created that.   [0:02:47] PJ: There's a fan out there that's made that, for sure.   [0:02:49] Will: My main prediction is that HBO is gonna make a lot of money.   [0:02:52] PJ: And then they're gonna go back, they're gonna do a prequel, right? I think there's already talk about some sort of ... Around the time of Aegon and the Mad King. [crosstalk]   [0:03:01] Will: There are apparently four or five in production right now.   [0:03:04] PJ: Jeez.   [0:03:04] Will: Yeah.   [0:03:05] Spencer: Wow.   [0:03:05] PJ: It's a cash cow. What're you gonna do?   [0:03:07] Will: Got to milk it.   [0:03:09] PJ: That's what you do with a cash cow, man.   [0:03:11] Spencer: Did you guys watch SNL this past weekend?   [0:03:13] PJ: I didn't, no. Was there-   [0:03:14] Spencer: Kit Harington was the host.   [0:03:15] PJ: Oh, nice.   [0:03:16] Will: Yeah, he looked like he's 12 years old when I saw that ... The photo. It was really weird.   [0:03:20] PJ: When he's clean-shaven, he does look very young.   [0:03:22] Spencer: He also has a very laddish accent compared to his Jon Snow character. But they had a skit that was a parody of all of the spin-offs, so they had a Game of Thrones that was a Law & Order ripoff, just all of these different versions taking characters and then putting them into a sitcom or a drama or whatever. It was really funny.   [0:03:41] PJ: Classic. Yeah, I mean, I wonder ... Those guys ... You would think you just have a calling card to any job you want after you were on Game of Thrones, but I don't know. It's tough to break out of that when you've made a role for yourself.   [0:03:54] Will: Yeah, you can get pigeonholed pretty easily, I think. I think some of the other characters like that, like Robb Stark, who died seasons ago, what's he been in? Who knows?   [0:04:03] PJ: I don't know. I just see flashes of his face in different-   [0:04:06] Spencer: Actually, I do know.   [0:04:06] PJ: You do know?   [0:04:06] Spencer: He's in that Bodyguard show.   [0:04:08] Will: Oh, really?   [0:04:09] Spencer: I forget what ... Is it Netflix?   [0:04:12] Will: Is Sean Bean at a Starbucks now, shilling coffees? Is that where he is after he said "No, I need more money," and they were like, "Well, we'll kill you in season one. It's fine."   [0:04:20] Spencer: Yeah, he was in the Bodyguard on Netflix. Check it out.   [0:04:24] PJ: Check it out. We're plugging it. Plugging it here. All right, guys, we could talk about Game of Thrones forever, we might as well move on. But in light of Game of Thrones coming up and all the exiles that happen throughout Game of Thrones, this is the Banishment Episode-   [0:04:40] Speaker 8: You are banished!   [0:04:42] PJ: -of Braze for Impact.   [0:04:46] Spencer: Dun dun dun.   [0:04:47] PJ: Exactly. Dun dun dun dun dun dun ... We're really thrilled about it. We're gonna talk about some bans and some tentative bans that are on our radar right now. Starting off with number one, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that includes language that would permanently bar the Internal Revenue Service from creating a free, electronic service for Americans to file their taxes, advancing a primary objective of the industry of for-profit companies like Intuit and H&R Block. Companies like Intuit, which produces TurboTax, which I use, and H&R Block allow most Americans to file for free as long as they earn less than $66,000 for the year, but most eligible Americans don't take advantage of that, with just three percent filing for free. Are you guys TurboTaxers? Do you-   [0:05:37] Will: TurboTax, yeah, regrettably.   [0:05:38] Spencer: TurboTax.   [0:05:39] PJ: We subscribe over here. TurboTax. Yeah, I was one of those late bloomers for doing my own taxes. It was kind of like you'd check off things as becoming an adult. "Oh, got to do this. Got to do this." Taxes was the last thing. It was like my dad did it, and I paid a guy to literally handle all of it. Now I'm TurboTax-ing, and I'm a grown, grown man now.   [0:05:58] Spencer: Consider yourself an adult?   [0:06:00] PJ: I thought ... For me, that was the last bit of criteria to say, "Okay, I've made it. I'm an adult."   [0:06:05] Will: It's truly ridiculous that we have to file like that. It's crazy. No other country in the world does it that way. Apparently, I think, in the UK, you have to make ... This number might be a little bit wrong, but it's something like 125,000 pounds a year to have to file. Other than that, what happens is the government just mails you your tax return, because they've got all the data like the IRS does. And they say, "If you want to contest this, go for it. Otherwise, here's your check."   [0:06:32] Spencer: Good to go.   [0:06:33] PJ: Yeah. Super easy. Why are we making it so hard on ourselves?   [0:06:37] Will: It also really screws poor people as well, here, because people have this idea in America that paying taxes ... You are always paying your taxes, right? Filing taxes your taxes is synonymous with paying your taxes. When in reality, if you make $30,000 a year, you're almost certainly going to get a refund. They're leaving money on the table, and if the IRS isn't automatically doing it, they don't get the refund, and IRS doesn't call them to complain, either.   [0:07:03] PJ: Yeah.   [0:07:06] Spencer: They have the information. Especially for a simple filer. You're just getting your deductions, you worked at the same place, you've lived in the same state. They know ... They know it. They could just do it. Estonia does this. Estonia. But apparently, I was reading-   [0:07:24] Will: They have e-citizenship, too, though.   [0:07:25] PJ: It just would ... Is it ... What's the reasoning? It's just it would take a lot of work for that to happen?   [0:07:30] Spencer: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, these companies spend a lot of money lobbying our Representatives.   [0:07:35] Will: Tens and tens of millions of dollars every year.   [0:07:38] Spencer: The second is the party that prefers to remove taxes, they tend to do it for the people with the most money. But that aside, they think that if it's too easy ... Too easy to pay your taxes, it'll be as a result too easy for our Congress to increase taxes. So they try to make it harder so that people have to go through the pain and we all hate taxes. So there's-   [0:08:08] PJ: So wait, the thinking is that taxes will be increased if we did less work?   [0:08:13] Will: They want you to associate misery and pain and nonsense with taxation every year, and they've been highly successful, I would say.   [0:08:21] PJ: Yeah, tell me about it.   [0:08:23] Will: So, it's ... I don't know. I hope that someday we get there, but this bill that's about to go through with the tax free preparation software, banning all that stuff, it's, I believe, a bipartisan-supported bill, which just makes me really, really ask virtually everyone in Congress, "Guys, what the hell's going on?"   [0:08:49] PJ: I mean, it's just they're making money, right? Is it just-   [0:08:52] Will: Yeah. I think it costs the IRS more money to deal with these external agencies, too. Because you have to imagine on the technical side, they're building integrations and accepting all these form factors from all these different places. If the IRS just built this internally, or some other service built it that was easy to use and free, everyone would start using that, and then all of a sudden all of the overhead costs and all that starts to go down, too.   [0:09:20] PJ: Well, let's hope there's a different future for us, because I think that should be a free tool, hands down.   [0:09:26] Spencer: For sure. Have any of you guys had to deal with cryptocurrency and paying taxes on that?   [0:09:33] Will: I have, yes. It was pretty damn confusing. That might be the exception for where you might have to file something yourselves.   [0:09:43] Spencer: Yeah, right. Here's this new, sketchy asset that I made some money on.   [0:09:47] Will: Yeah, I made ... Not, I would say, a well-informed investment on it, because I don't think virtually anyone's investment on it is well-informed, unless you're a Ph.D. Mathematician who's dug into the source code. But yeah, I'd go as one of the lucky ones and got out while I was sensible, so I had to figure out where the hell to put that in TurboTax. It was weird.   [0:10:06] PJ: I'm sure it was. Did you, as well, or-   [0:10:08] Spencer: Yeah, this year. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it now, but-   [0:10:13] PJ: Well, since you're mentioning crypto ... Nice segue. Appreciate it. Onto our next ban. China considers ban on cryptocurrency ... Mining, that is, because it's a stupid waste of energy. Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an undesirable economic activity, according to a government document released Monday. Basically, the whole thinking is that it's a huge waste on valuable resources because it takes so much energy to do this crypto mining. According to a recent report in Nature Sustainability, crypto mining emits anywhere between three million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide globally. China making a decision that's good for the environment? I'm a little confused.   [0:10:59] Will: Yeah, although they've actually been getting a lot better about that. I think they won the race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact, and then realized how awful the bottom was and are trying to desperately claw up the other side now.   [0:11:12] Spencer: Yeah, I think with the Olympics, when they had to just close factories so that it wasn't so polluted that people were hacking up a lung while running a marathon.   [0:11:21] PJ: Jeez.   [0:11:21] Will: Yeah. It's still not good there, but they're doing a lot more, I think. Anyway, on the crypto subject, I just don't know. It's just like ... I see the potential, maybe, of something like this in the future, but right now, I read some article ... This was a year ago, that said that a year ago, Bitcoin itself was taking as much electrical energy every month as the nation of Germany.   [0:11:51] Spencer: I think it's one percent of global energy consumption is going to Bitcoin mining.   [0:11:55] Will: Yeah, and they kept saying that it's gonna go up. And that's only Bitcoin, too. There are, what, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies? If you assume Bitcoin is maybe half the market, probably? Something like that? Or maybe it's a third. Who knows? Anyways, that means a huge portion of global energy is essentially right now going to give people another store of money. Banking's a hell of a lot cheaper. Do you know how much energy J.P. Morgan probably spends? I don't know what it is, but I guarantee you it's not one percent of energy.   [0:12:31] PJ: Right.   [0:12:31] Spencer: Especially since most of the mining happens in China, and they're still pretty reliant on coal for a lot of that energy consumption, so not great with the whole global warming thing and the future of humanity, but who knows?   [0:12:44] PJ: Yeah, but I mean, you mentioned it, Will. Maybe sometimes you need to hit the bottom first to know that you need to dig yourselves out.   [0:12:52] Will: I just want to thank you guys as the hosts of this podcast for picking really uplifting topics. [crosstalk]   [0:12:57] Spencer: Do you have a story about hitting rock bottom you'd like to share with us?   [0:13:01] Will: No, that's coming in an upcoming episode of When Shift Hits the Fan.   [0:13:03] PJ: That's true. Look forward to our Rock Bottom Episode, starring Will Crocker.   [0:13:07] Spencer: Will, didn't you ... You were telling me before the show a little bit about graphics cards and how the changing and use in mining was affecting the prices.   [0:13:17] Will: Oh, yeah, there was a point where I ... I play computer games, so I own a graphics card, and there was a point where I bought a graphics card, and usually any piece of technology you buy depreciates over time. It's just because newer stuff comes out, and it gets better. But the market for GPUs, which are graphical processing units, was so nuts because of Bitcoin a couple years ago that I realized my graphics card had appreciated almost 50% at one point. And there just came a point when I was like, "Should I just sell this thing and wait for a while and get out of the market?" But it's absolutely insane how much the prices were fluctuating based upon that. If anybody who's an nVidia stockholder, you rode that wave right with everyone else.   [0:13:59] PJ: The graphics card biz. I see you, Will.   [0:14:03] Will: I'm long on the graphics card biz. They have real applications, too, like neural net processing and a lot of the kind of things that you see people doing, like libraries like TensorFlow to do understanding complex deep learning problems in computer science. All of that requires GPUs, essentially, so it's gonna come forward, but it's gonna fall a little bit for the crypto.   [0:14:26] PJ: Will, since you are such a gamer, and I am as well ... Spencer, were you a little bit in your heyday, probably?   [0:14:32] Spencer: A little bit.   [0:14:33] PJ: I mean, I think given that, Will, you should probably take some beef with Prince Harry, because this next article: Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite. I know that's not your top game, but still, I mean, let's take a look at this.   [0:14:47] Will: Yeah. Fortnite's all right.   [0:14:49] PJ: Ahead of one of the biggest nights in the gaming industry, Prince Harry has called for a ban on Fortnite due to its supposed addictive qualities. Harry said, "That game shouldn't be allowed." In a British accent, of course. "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where's the benefit of having it in your household?" And then, also, Harry suggested Fortnite, a shooter game focused on survival, was responsible for tearing families apart. "It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorstep and families being broken down."   [0:15:24] Spencer: Is this real?   [0:15:24] PJ: This is real. This is a legitimate quote.   [0:15:26] Spencer: No.   [0:15:26] PJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.   [0:15:27] Will: You're tearing me apart, Lisa!   [0:15:30] PJ: "You're tearing me apart, Prince Harry!" Yeah. So that's where he stands on it. Ironically enough, he feels the same way about social media, feels like it's real poison in general. And I guess a day later, him and Meghan Markle started their own Instagram page, so you can follow them on that, which is nice.   [0:15:51] Will: Oh, yeah, which also isn't destroying society at all, right? That's just totally fine that everyone's addicted to Instagram and those things.   [0:15:58] PJ: Exactly. I mean, ban on addictive substances, i.e. Video games. This is ... We're addicted to our tech, obviously, right? But thoughts on video games? To me, my argument was always: video games, yes, they can suck time and everything, but to me, it was always ... It's like an interactive art form. I'm witnessing somebody's art they've put together. Especially MMORPGs, massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Anything that has a big, big, huge world, and I just want to run around all of it, I just really appreciate the design and thought that goes into all of it. That's my feeling.   [0:16:33] Will: It's like a concert in some ways, right? Like at a concert, you're coming to watch music, but you're also coming together to experience that with everyone else around you, and I think multiplayer games are the same way. You're creating that human interaction, which creates the art around it.   [0:16:44] PJ: Yeah.   [0:16:46] Will: Yeah, I don't know about this. I wonder if EA bribed Prince Harry to pick on Fortnite. It was like, "Epic Games needs to be taken down a notch." Because couldn't you just make this claim about most games?   [0:16:58] Spencer: Yeah, why Fortnite, Prince Harry?   [0:17:01] Will: Just because it's the big target. I don't know.   [0:17:03] PJ: Yeah, that's probably what it was. He was thinking about it, and it's just-   [0:17:06] Spencer: It's the only video game he's heard of.   [0:17:07] PJ: I mean, for a guy who smokes as much pot as Prince Harry, I would've thought that video games would be right ... What do you do, then, when you're stoned?   [0:17:13] Will: Is he a toker? I didn't know that.   [0:17:15] Spencer: Yeah, if we want to talk about tearing families apart, how about the royal family of the British Empire?   [0:17:20] PJ: Oh, man. Dude. Counterargument in your face.   [0:17:24] Will: Whoa, guys. Whoa, guys. We have EMEA customers here.   [0:17:28] PJ: Of course, we're just playing. This is all in jest. But no, I think it's a genuine thing. I'm sure plenty of parents are concerned when their kids are spending hours and hours in their room. I'm sure they also don't understand how social gaming actually is.   [0:17:42] Spencer: Especially Fortnite.   [0:17:43] PJ: Especially Fortnite. But what I will say, if you want to ban Apex Legends, you can just go ahead and do that as far as I'm concerned, because I can't even get in a session without throwing the remote against the wall, everyone's so good.   [0:17:54] Spencer: Talk to this guy.   [0:17:55] Will: It's just because you're bad. But it's just the ... Real talk. I'm sorry. Don't just run around in the open and just flail about. Hide behind things. Shoot people.   [0:18:04] Spencer: You should get a lesson from Will.   [0:18:05] PJ: I thought that when you run out in the middle of the board and you kind of scattershot and spin in circles-   [0:18:10] Spencer: He can't be taught.   [0:18:11] Will: I need clay to mold.   [0:18:14] PJ: I'm too old. I'm too old. This old sponge is dried up. There's not much I can learn left.   [0:18:18] Spencer: "This Old Sponge," that's our new show.   [0:18:21] Will: On the subject of ... "This Old Sponge," with PJ Bruno. But on the subject of addiction and games, I do think it's a problem. It is something that ... it's not great for kids to spend infinite hours on these sort of things, but I think there's some interesting, far less intrusive ways than banning the stupid thing. I think ... I've seen some things I think in Vietnam or China, somewhere in Asia, there're some countries now which have stipulations that if somebody has n hours of consecutive play time, that they then have to pop up a message that says, "Hey, are you sure you want to keep playing? Maybe it's time to go take a break or go outside."   [0:19:00] PJ: That's pretty cool.   [0:19:00] Spencer: I like that.   [0:19:00] Will: Or I think some of the games also have something where you have to ... you get reduced experience or something like that after you play for too many consecutive hours.   [0:19:10] PJ: Interesting.   [0:19:11] Spencer: In-game punishment.   [0:19:12] Will: So the game ... Yeah, so you basically get decreasing rewards in the margin.   [0:19:17] Spencer: That's smart.   [0:19:18] PJ: That is really smart. Or if they could have a feature that causes your parent to care more and actually put some restrictions on how much you're playing the game. That's just me. Anyways, we're at our time. Will, thank you so much for being here.   [0:19:35] Will: Thank you, PJ. I hope you find yourself in the game someday, and stop hating the game. Hate the player.   [0:19:43] PJ: That's true. And I'll never stop searching for myself in-game. Spencer, thanks for coming along for the ride.   [0:19:48] Spencer: Thanks, Peej.   [0:19:49] PJ: And you, too. Thanks for joining us, guys. You take care. [0:19:52]

Braze's Director of Data Jesse Tao and Tech Alliances Manager at Looker Erin Franz graciously break down BI tools and the value of data for the rest of us civilians. They walk through the marketization of data and the power of Looker blocks.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hi there. This is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. And I'm thrilled today to have two very good friends of mine, Jesse Tao, our director of data, the man about data. What's the title Jesse? It's just data person?   [0:00:33] Jesse: Well my Slack title is just data stuff.   [0:00:35] PJ: Right. So we have Jesse Tao, data stuff-   [0:00:38] Jesse: Official title is, Head of Data Strategy.   [0:00:41] PJ: Head of Data Stuff, Jesse Tao, and also our very good friend joining us from Looker, that's Erin Franz. Hi Erin.   [0:00:48] Erin: Hi.   [0:00:49] PJ: Good to have you here.   [0:00:50] Erin: Yeah, glad to be here.   [0:00:51] PJ: How's the day been so far? You guys have been doing workshops right?   [0:00:54] Erin: Yeah. Flew in last night. Just starting the day early, east coast time. Feeling great.   [0:00:58] PJ: Awesome. Not too jet lagged yet? You're feeling good?   [0:01:01] Erin: So far.   [0:01:02] PJ: Hitting our stride. That's what I like to hear. So we're here today to talk about data, about insights. I'm sure as you two know, over the past 30 years there's been monumental strides in what that means to companies, and the value that it can add. So let's start really, really general, where we are today. Erin, can you speak to some patterns that we've since in data, since the beginning of it? I guess from relational, to non relational databases, to the kind of stuff that you work with right now?   [0:01:34] Erin: Yeah. I mean, I can speak to ... Since I've joined Looker about four years ago, sort of how the landscape's changed and how we've seen sort of the product evolve with the technologies that have become available. So I think when Looker was founded six years ago or so, Redshift was just emerging as this modern analytical data warehouse. And those technologies didn't really exist before. And what this enabled, was the ability to actually expose large volumes of data across an organization in a way that multiple people could be accessing at the same time, and really using it to make data-driven decisions. Luckily, Looker took a bet on SQL being kind of this language of querying that would scale with all these different technologies that have come out. And luckily, that's been the case. With Redshift, we've also seen other databases like Snowflake and Google has BigQuery, that have really enabled organizations to become data-driven and self-serving when it comes to making decisions based on data.   [0:02:37] PJ: And making it more accessible to people like me, like pedestrians, plebs, who just don't really understand kind of the technical side of data. It's like-   [0:02:47] Erin: Exactly.   [0:02:48] PJ: Democratizes it a bit.   [0:02:49] Erin: Right. Making it accessible in a way that it's not just accessible to technical folks, to data analysts, to people who understand SQL and know how to code, to people who just want to click and drop and create reports and explore data on their own, products like Looker make that possible.   [0:03:06] PJ: And Jesse you work with Looker pretty regularly at this point?   [0:03:10] Jesse: Yes, almost every day.   [0:03:11] PJ: Almost every day. And I mean we wouldn't call you a pedestrian, you're pretty deep in data, you understand it well enough.   [0:03:16] Jesse: Yes I do.   [0:03:17] PJ: Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the marketization of data. This is something that's-   [0:03:22] Jesse: Yeah, you know, I think today we collect a lot of data. And in my opinion, data has more or less become a commodity now, rather than the hot topic. And what the hot topic of today is, it's insights. Because you're thinking about it, we're collecting a lot of data. We have data coming in from IOT and all these other sources, and most of the data that's collected, isn't being used. So, how useful is something that's sitting in the data of our house, kind of just collecting dust? So, very low value there. The value is from the insights, from actually analyzing the data, getting the data and figuring out what you want to do with it, to drive business decisions. And this is kind of where Braze comes in, and Looker comes in. We're providing the data and also providing the framework and the tools for people who are not using data, to get insights out of it and actually use that data. So I think in terms of the marketing pressure in the industry, we're moving ... We're going to still collect a lot of data, but more of the focus is going to be on how do we actually use that data faster and more efficiently?   [0:04:21] PJ: Right. Because if you're not using that data and you're not taking action on it, you're going to be left in the dust, more or less, right? Is that the ...   [0:04:27] Jesse: Yes. To put it in Marie Kondo terms, data just sitting there, brings us no joy.   [0:04:33] PJ: And you're all about sparking joy.   [0:04:36] Jesse: Sure.   [0:04:38] PJ: All right then. Okay, well what sorts of data, insights are available to day that wasn't available in the past? Obviously this is kind of a big sweeping generalization, but what can we speak to currently?   [0:04:49] Erin: I think some common themes that we've seen emerging are, people are collecting data from tools that they are using in their business, whether that's a Salesforce as a CRM's index as a support system and centralizing all that data in one place. So you're not just accessing one data set, not just your transactional data set, but also the data sets that define your whole business and your whole customer journey. So you're actually able to create kind of that 360 view of the customer that we're all sort of striving for, from as many sources as possible. And that's become possible because of these data warehousing technologies that are now available.   [0:05:27] PJ: It's all about that 360 degree view these days, isn't it?   [0:05:30] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:05:33] PJ: Because I'm still kind of just getting my feet wet with my understanding of the eco system of products right? You have your attribution, you have your CDPs, Braze is in there somewhere-   [0:05:44] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:05:46] PJ: Engagement. So Looker is the analysis, it's less the visualization and more the business intelligence right? Because I feel like on our call, we talked a little bit, it's not just graphs right?   [0:05:57] Erin: Right. Part of it is graphs for sure-   [0:06:00] PJ: Right.   [0:06:00] Erin: You need to be able to visualize your data, but much more than that, of course we always say the starting point for Looker is a dashboard, or a visualization. You can really drill into that visualization, see the components that have built that. If you're technical, you can even see the SQL that is being written to the database to supply that result set. And then you can modify that report, you can drill down into the granular level data that's supplying the data for that visualization. So let's say you're looking at event count by day on your application, you can see what those events are just by clicking into one of those data points.   [0:06:36] PJ: Gotcha. And that data, that belongs to the company effectively, or that belongs to the user?   [0:06:45] Jesse: I have a point of view on that. And before I share my thoughts, I'll preface it by saying I'm not a lawyer, so do not use this as legal advice.   [0:06:53] PJ: Okay, thanks for that.   [0:06:55] Jesse: I think the data ultimately belongs to the end user, but the company is basically the custodian of that data. Because without the end user, there is no data but without the company, there's not way of collecting or storing that data. So, the company is more or less using, collecting that data on behalf of the user. They're creating some sort of value from it, either from messaging or personalization or just understanding the user a little bit better. Some way of using that data to create insights into the level of value to that user. But ultimately, it is that user's data and the user should own that data. I think that's the point of view that many countries and regulatory bodies are holding as well. If you look at GDPR as well as the upcoming California privacy laws, the focus is really on the end user and their ability to control the data that they collect, the accuracy of it and the right to be forgotten. So, I think there is a common theme where the view point is the end user owns the data whereas, the companies are the ones who are using it to provide value both to the user and to the marketplace.   [0:08:03] PJ: That makes sense. And the California protection, that's going to happen at the end of this year right?   [0:08:11] Jesse: I don't know the exact timeline. We'll have to refer to our legal team about that.   [0:08:14] PJ: Okay. Well we can patch that up later if we need to. So Erin, let's dig more into Looker a little bit. What's the real differentiator for you guys? What do you guys kind of hold up as a torch? This is kind of who we are and what makes us stand out-   [0:08:29] Erin: Yeah.   [0:08:30] PJ: Amongst the other tools.   [0:08:31] Erin: I think luckily, the core Looker product has been fundamentally the same since its inception. With the core differentiators being that it's entirely in database. So as we talked about, the ability to access all of the data, down to the granular ... Most granular level that you're collecting it and exposed that across your organization. And the way that we're able to do that while still providing standards governance, so users are not creating their own one-off definitions of revenue, something that's incredibly important to reporting, is through our modeling layer, which is called LookML. So that's where you define all the business logic that your end data consumers will be using, whether by just exposing them to pre-built dashboards, visualizations or having them build their own content. And the way this works, while still leveraging the database, is it's really just an abstraction of SQL, or the language that you're using to create those database investments. And then finally, it's a web-based modern application. So that makes it really easy to share, collaborate and extend into plenty of other users. We have a fully baked API where you can serve data from Looker elsewhere to bring it into the tools where you need it.   [0:09:46] PJ: So LookML, you said it's your own language-   [0:09:50] Erin: Yup.   [0:09:50] PJ: It's built on another language-   [0:09:53] Erin: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:09:54] PJ: And so if you know LookML, it actually is useful outside of Looker as well.   [0:09:59] Erin: It's proprietary to the product, but it's very ... What you're doing is modeling the components of SQL, which is a core skillset of any data analyst. It really just makes it easier because instead of writing one-off queries, you're writing the components of those queries so they can be reused, by not only the data analyst, but also by all the data consumers.   [0:10:21] PJ: Gotcha. Cool. Well let's talk Looker Blocks. This is what I really want to get into because I first heard about it at LTR 2018, because we announced our first Looker Block right?   [0:10:34] Jesse: Two Looker Blocks actually.   [0:10:35] PJ: Thank you Jesse. Fact checking on the go. Do you want to talk about that? That was kind of a big release right?   [0:10:43] Jesse: Yeah, it was a pretty big release because it was still pretty early on in our relationship with Looker but we saw the immediate value pretty early on, so we decided to move quickly in that direction. And I'll let Erin talk a little bit about what our Looker Blocks, but the two Looker Blocks that we released back in November, are based around our currents data export and it focuses on market engagement and user behavior. So marketing engagement on the Braze data side will be things like email sends, push opens and at message clicks, stuff like that. And user behavior includes things like session starts and app purchases, so the behaviors of the users. We take all of that information together to create really useful insights around how campaigns are performing, user retention, if campaigns are improving your driving purchases, things like that.   [0:11:32] PJ: Gotcha. And Looker Blocks for those of us who don't actually know the definition-   [0:11:39] Erin: Yeah.   [0:11:39] PJ: Are basically ...   [0:11:40] Erin: They're basically templates for LookML. So LookML is a text-base modeling language. So we can model expected data sources upfront. So, data sources that are going to have a common schema, so common tables, columns, fields, within that. We've created a bunch of these for sources that are commonly used across our customers like Salesforce, Zendesk, as I mentioned before, Google AdWords, Facebook ads. The sources we're seeing most often, and then also the sources that we want to model proactively with our partners like Braze.   [0:12:12] PJ: Cool. And so these two Looker Blocks, these are the first of many.   [0:12:16] Jesse: Yes.   [0:12:18] PJ: Cool. I mean, do you know what's on deck? Do we know what's coming up or do we want to save that for our next episode?   [0:12:24] Jesse: We can save that for the next episode, but I actually want to talk a little bit about why we decided to make these Looker Blocks. And I think it's because we saw in it, the common vision with our product, which is data agility, or what we call, data agility. And that means basically speed to insight for us. As I mentioned before, the value of data is not in the data itself, it's what you can do with it, and how you can actually gets insights out of it. And with Looker Blocks, it acts as a template where we are predefining all the data fields and relationships, and providing those fundamental building blocks for us and out customers to build on top of. So, what would historically take a data engineer or a BI developer weeks, days, potentially even months to model, we do all of that leg work for our customers so they can just drag and drop in those Looker Blocks and be ready to find insights within minutes or hours.   [0:13:20] PJ: So that's huge. That's going to save time.   [0:13:22] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:13:24] PJ: It's exciting. All right, let's move on down to data tech changing roles. How is data tech ... How is it changing the way people are doing their jobs and what will the change for real expectations be in the future?   [0:13:39] Jesse: Sure. Now, I think that people are becoming a lot more data-driven, and thinking about how to both collect and use data in their every day lives. Well not just their every day lives, but every day professional lives. They're using data to not just justify their decisions, but also to understand what the implications are in areas that they may not have seen before. And I think that's going to be a point of differentiation for customers, for our companies, because if you can actually use the data in a very insightful way, you can understand more about your users, your competitors, the marketplace and be able to confidently act in a way that will set you apart. And I think in terms of the data collection, the aspect of privacy is going to be more and more important as well. As I mentioned before, there's GDPR, there's the California privacy laws. I think people are just going to be ... Sorry. I think people are going to have to be more careful about what they collect because in the past, you could collect everything. And now with the privacy breeches you've been seeing at big tech companies, big banks, people have to be careful about both what they're collecting and how they're using it.   [0:14:49] PJ: What's the most insightful way you've collected data to make a decision about your life? Putting you on the spot Jesse. I'll start.   [0:14:58] Jesse: Okay.   [0:15:00] PJ: Mine will have to be using Rotten Tomatoes to decide to not watch movies. That's probably it. That's probably saved me several hours of viewing time.   [0:15:11] Jesse: Okay. So I actually have a script that I write, that scrapes lottery websites for the winning numbers, as well as the pay out. And I modeled out something where something like Powerball or Mega Millions, the optimal time to buy is a jackpot of around 3.25 to 3.5 million because at that time, there are not so many buyers where you have to split the pot. So you basically maximize your payout that way. So, we have office lotto pools here and I don't really partake in them up until a certain point where I think there's a higher payout.   [0:15:49] PJ: I'm going to keep that in mind Jesse. That's a good one. That was a really good one.   [0:15:52] Erin: Yeah, saving time, stress. I'm more on the Rotten Tomatoes path.   [0:15:59] PJ: Yeah?   [0:15:59] Erin: Yeah.   [0:16:00] PJ: Do your homework, do your reviews, leverage the data available.   [0:16:03] Erin: I guess restaurants also.   [0:16:05] PJ: Yup. Yeah.   [0:16:07] Erin: Avid Yelp user.   [0:16:08] PJ: I'm a latecomer-   [0:16:09] Erin: Not a reviewer but-   [0:16:10] PJ: Not a reviewer, right. I'm a voyeur. I hide in the comments and I watch.   [0:16:13] Erin: Yes.   [0:16:14] PJ: I'm a-   [0:16:14] Jesse: Lurker.   [0:16:15] PJ: What's that?   [0:16:16] Jesse: A lurker.   [0:16:16] PJ: I'm a lurker. I'm a lurker, that's right.   [0:16:18] Erin: Yeah, I rely on those people who are letting people know their opinions.   [0:16:22] PJ: And I'm a latecomer to Reddit actually. I kind of just joined the bandwagon because I needed information on a certain thing. I was like, wow, this isn't just funny comments, there's a lot of really useful information here. Who knew? Anyways, so what were some trends, some hot ideas in the last few years that really didn't deliver on its promise? What are some current trends or hot ideas you think do have promise in the future? Erin, you want to weigh in?   [0:16:48] Erin: Well, getting back to technology here, I think that as companies starting becoming more digital, and they were collecting so much more data and they wanted a place to put it, a data lake, and I think you know, I don't know how long ago it was, but Hadoop technology has emerged as kind of this place where you could be putting all your log data, all of your transactional data, all of this data. And it was easy to collect potentially, but not easy to actually self serve. So you were collecting all this data, but you didn't know ... There was no way to expose it to the organization. So I think that these analytical data warehouses have really filled that void and actually made that possible. And we've only seen that within the past five years or so.   [0:17:33] PJ: Can you tell me the different between a data warehouse and a data lake? Because I've heard data lake around this office over the past eight or nine months, and is there a big different that I'm missing?   [0:17:45] Erin: I can give the high level and then I think Jesse might want to comment on the more details. But you can think of a data lake as more like a file system. So you're putting all these files of data in this place for storage, but that doesn't make it necessarily accessible to the people who need it.   [0:18:02] PJ: But the warehouse, you can actually do more with it?   [0:18:05] Erin: Right. In a more performant way.   [0:18:07] Jesse: Yeah, I mean the way I would kind of think about it is a little bit more literally if you will. A data warehouse you can image as potentially a physical warehouse that you can just put anything in there. In this case, it's going to be data. And a data lake, you can think of as a warehouse that has a giant pool in it. All that data is kind of just swimming around in a, I wouldn't call it a liquid form, but there's ... It's potentially unstructured, it's very fluid, it's just there.   [0:18:31] PJ: Makes sense.   [0:18:32] Jesse: And then people can go into that data lake with buckets or whatever tool to extract the data that they need.   [0:18:40] PJ: That's a good metaphor. And so data lakes versus data ponds, is there ...   [0:18:45] Jesse: There have been some ... I've heard the term data ponds before-   [0:18:48] PJ: Really? Okay. I thought I was just messing with you, but I guess I wasn't-   [0:18:53] Jesse: No I've heard it before. I don't think we're currently using that though.   [0:18:56] PJ: All right, Jesse, hot shot, will data proficiency be a core skill for talent in the future? What do you think?   [0:19:05] Jesse: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think here at Braze, and just at other companies, just reading the news, you hear more and more about how companies try to be data-driven. If you just look at our job descriptions, by the way we're hiring, and job descriptions of other companies you see, the requirement of understanding the different data warehouses, technologies, how to use data. A move from Excel to more complicated analytics technologies like Looker for example, becoming more and more popular. So it's absolutely going to be more important in the future. And you know I think for data analysts, that's ... Their role has kind of changed over the recent years and will continue to change as well. I think for the data analysts that I see, it's moving more and more towards a full staff knowledge. So before, you would see people focusing on one element of the data pipeline, whereas analysts today tend to have more visibility over how to bring data in, how to clean it, how to do the app analysis and the visualization, everything. And I think there's going to be more focus on the domain knowledge as well because data and insights out of context, is not going to be terribly useful to the organization. So we need to know how to appropriately analyze and interpret enough information in a way that the business or the end users can actually use. Also, I think in terms of the marketplace, you're just going to see more and more technologies. Some better, some worse than others, within the visualization space. Looker is pretty new, they're a ... I would call them a challenger, again something encompassing the place and they're doing very well. But going further upstream, you're seeing a lot of new database, data warehouse technologies, a lot of new ETL technologies. So I think the data analysts of today and tomorrow, are just going to be more familiar with these technologies and how to use these technologies. And then flipping a little bit to the non technical people, so the end consumers of the data. I think you're going to see changes there as well, especially as data becomes more democratized, and easier to use and consume. We're definitely seeing a trend towards self service. So, drag and drop analysis of data rather than actually going into the data warehouse to write the code and analyze it. We're seeing more sophisticated alerting, so we know when data isn't looking the way we think it should be looking. And that's just going to allow people to move a lot more quickly and more confidently as they try out experiments, they do AB tests and iterate quickly.   [0:21:37] PJ: Brave new world.   [0:21:38] Jesse: Yes.   [0:21:40] PJ: Erin, you want to weigh in? What does the future hold for Looker? You don't need to show your full hand. I know you guys have stuff. But anything you want to leave us with?   [0:21:49] Erin: Yeah, I think beyond sort of self service, the core BI use case, Looker's really trying to position itself as a data platform. So, not just for internal analytics and reporting, but also serving data elsewhere to other applications, to deliver data where it needs to go, like the action hub integration that we built with Braze. So, basically connecting the dots when it comes to doing analysis and taking action on it. So, building your list of users you want to target a campaign to and not just having to export that and then upload it into a tool, but creating that link directly to that product you're using.   [0:22:32] PJ: Awesome. Cool. A lot stuff to look forward to then.   [0:22:35] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:22:35] PJ: Thank you guys so much for being here with me, and thank you guys for joining us. This has been Jesse Tao, Erin Franz and PJ Bruno. Happy visualizing. [0:22:45]

Jon Hyman, Braze CTO and Founder, gives his insights on the future of data privacy, the responsibilities of entrepreneurs/lawmakers, and the pressures on tech giants to comply to a new frontier of legislation.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello there. This is PJ Bruno and welcome back to Braze for Impact; Your weekly tech industry discussed digest. Very thrilled to have with us here today, our CTO and founder at Braze, John Hyman. John thanks for being here.   [0:00:31] John Hyman: Thanks for having me on the podcast PJ.   [0:00:33] PJ Bruno: I mean as you it's been a long time coming. We've had to reschedule numerous times.   [0:00:37] John Hyman: It's been challenging, but I've wanted to be here for a while.   [0:00:40] PJ Bruno: I know. Well luckily now it seems like the equipment is working okay. Finally, glad to have you on the mic. For those of you who don't know, John Hyman is our MC extraordinaire so to get him in here, for me, is a big deal. So, John where do we start. Privacy. Privacy is in the air. Everyone's talking about the past year has been just a crossfire for some of these tech giants. Facebook specifically. And it kind of seems to have caused a lot of companies to like pivot their focus towards really like catering to that anxiety that some people have around privacy. So, where do you want to start?   [0:01:13] John Hyman: There really is so much to unpack when it comes to privacy, but I like that what you just mentioned in your introduction is that we are seeing some companies starting to pivot more toward that as a focus. If I even look at what's been going on this week alone, yesterday we had Apple announce a credit card with Goldman Sachs and a competitive feature that they are really pushing hard is the privacy aspect of it. So, Apple says that Goldman Sachs isn't going to use your data in any way other to than to operate the card. So they are not going to share or sell that data to third parties.   [0:01:49] PJ Bruno: Okay.   [0:01:50] John Hyman: That information about your purchases is going to exist on your iPhone and not in Apple's cloud. Apple is not going to see it. They didn't even put your credit card number on the card itself, so the card itself is basically just blank with a chip and a stripe...   [0:02:04] PJ Bruno: [crosstalk] Oh wow.   [0:02:04] John Hyman: ...and your name.   [0:02:06] PJ Bruno: Sounds very futuristic doesn't it?   [0:02:08] John Hyman: It does look pretty cool and I think will show everyone that you got a lot of disposable income.   [0:02:12] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:02:12] John Hyman: When you pull out it might be the new AMEX Platinum card or something.   [0:02:16] PJ Bruno: Yeah. [laughing]   [0:02:16] John Hyman: But, what we look at the line that they're taking is that they're really trying to sell this privacy aspect and I think that if you look at Apple's business overall they are also trying to differentiate themselves from the larger tech companies like Facebook and Google because they want to say that they respect your privacy. I remember back at CES in Las Vegas they had a big, cheeky ad up that just said," What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." And they were really just taking this jab...   [0:02:44] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:02:44] John Hyman: ...you know at google and other providers because they're putting that forward as a focus. They release a lot of features. We have one coming out on Safari and on your iPhone that is going to limit the time that cookies can live on your device. It's something called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” that Apple's coming out with. And so they're really trying to make a deliberate push into saying, "We're a privacy provider for you. If you want your data to be safe, then you should use Apple Products.” And I think its really interesting positioning, because globally privacy is a word that's on everyone's tongue. We see a lot of different scandals...   [0:03:18] PJ Bruno: Um-hmm.   [0:03:19] John Hyman: ...that are happening in the news and they're not just happening from technology companies. They're really just happening with any kind of big data breach or any other system. We've seen things like Equifax losing and leaking the Social Security numbers of more than half of Americans. We've had Starwood and Marriott leak the names of and information of 100s of millions of their consumers. These aren't great, big tech companies that consumer tech companies like Facebook. And then we just go to those companies and there still countless scandals there on Facebook had. Cambridge Analytica had had...   [0:03:53] PJ Bruno: Right. Of course.   [0:03:53] John Hyman: 50+ million subscriber information that had leaked. I believe even last week Facebook said that they had leaded, in plain text, the passwords of about ten or twenty million users. And so there's just really this non stop barrage...   [0:04:08] PJ Bruno: Jesus.   [0:04:08] John Hyman: ... Of bad press when it comes to privacy that consumers are listening to and I think being shaped by and seeing that," Hey, there is all of this data that's out about me in this world and I want to now kind of clamp down on that." Apple, I think, is taking a fairly opportunistic you know kind of look at...   [0:04:27] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:04:27] John Hyman: ...how they want to position themselves in it. But, I do think its fairly interesting that we see now other businesses are having to shift toward that.   [0:04:35] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Definitely. I mean you know what's interesting to me is it seemed like a lot of these fines that were happening you know just last week federal prosecutors are like conducting a criminal investigation into data deals with Facebook and that was all around user consent. And so it was not compromised passwords. Its not like okay you're potentially losing all of your you know information. It was just more okay they're using your information to sell or to make decisions. Where do you stand? As far as the data privacy person like, personally, because me... I'm like," I kinda don't care." Like I'm sorry I wish I did more but its like as long my information or like my bank account is not compromised if you're using that data, even unbeknownst to me, to like better cater to me I kinda don't mind. Like where do you sit on the fence?   [0:05:29] John Hyman: So the reason, to me, that this is a challenging situation is really multifaceted. One, it comes down to the fact that I think the average consumer may not be aware of all of the things that are ongoing about them on their phones, by Facebook, on the Internet. All these little pieces of information that are essentially are tracked about them and I'm not sure that the average consumer may understand this profile which built up. And the reason that I think that is because we do see very strong adverse reactions to when this does happen in the press. So, the New York Times writes a story about some information that's being sent to Facebook and then you see essentially online or through politicians commenting on news programs that there a strong reaction to things that do seem somewhat day to day in the running of what is essentially an analytics company. And so I'm not... I think that's kind of one part of it is people may not be aware of the full scope about it. The second part is, do you think that in some cases, to your point, it may be a bit hard to understand the damages that it can be caused to an individual by having all of this information out there? So a lot of people are using Facebook and Google and they're using it for free and everyone knows that if you're not paying for a product then you are the product. But, I think if you had to enumerate and ask people to enumerate the actual downsides, to them, that might be challenging that goes kind of hand in hand with that first part of it. I mean, literally I think if you had like a Harris Poll and you called a 1000 random Americans and you said," Hi there. I'd like to conduct a survey and I'm curious to know your opinions on why is it bad for you that Facebook has this information on you?” And I think that you might get some responses that prosper anecdotal of, "I know someone that had their identity stolen" or," It seems pretty creepy to me.” But, in term of actually enumerating those problems unto them, I think that that could be a bit hard cause it's such an abstract challenge. So, I think that we're essentially working against that as well which makes it a hard topic to discuss because some people like, "[inaudible] what does this really matter? Like I'll give my information." Its interesting if you just think about the amount of information that I'll give online all the time. Like I'm constantly putting in my zip code and my email address.   [0:07:36] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:07:36] John Hyman: Gender. All these different things into different forms online. Not even thinking about kind of what the purpose is there.   [0:07:43] PJ Bruno: Do you have your credit card memorized?   [0:07:45] John Hyman: I used to [crosstalk] have my credit card memorized. But then Google Chrome started to remember the credit cards for me. So, it does then go back to that convenience factor of I can forget information. I think the same with phone numbers, I used to know [crosstalk] all of my friends phone numbers growing up. At home, we would dial it on the phone lines. And now I think I had if you were a friend before 2006 then I know your phone number I can still go back though elementary school or high school and list out those phone numbers. Even now, I couldn't even give you Bill Magnuson's cell phone number. And I know the first six digits I think. But, I probably just can't because he and I didn't meet until later in life when I already had my phone replacing parts of my memory for me there.   [0:08:32] PJ Bruno: Exactly. Exactly.   [0:08:32] John Hyman: But, essentially, we come back to where I stand. I do think that ultimately there is a lot of benefit to providing consumers with personalized and relevant information. I do think that that is in the... For the benefit of consumers.   [0:08:47] PJ Bruno: Um-hmm   [0:08:47] John Hyman: You ever receive an email and it's about something to purchase and it's a product that you'd never looked at never been interested in may not even be right for you at all. You know a lot of us have had direction like," Why am I getting a you know a sale on boots when you know I was looking at you know dress suits" or other things online and...   [0:09:08] PJ Bruno: Um-hmm   [0:09:08] John Hyman: ... This doesn't match my kind of shopping interest right now. So, I think that it is really a beneficial if we can deliver personalized customer experiences to consumers based on their interests, based on things that are relevant to them, to their demographics...   [0:09:22] PJ Bruno: Um-hmm   [0:09:23] John Hyman: ... To their behaviors, to what we think they're going be add most value to them. I do think that is extremely valuable and you see that Google can do it to when you ever Google something into a search bar and then your like the auto completed exactly what I wanted. Its like they knew me really really well. And then some parts there's like a ... It feels a little bit creepy of you know if my phone listening to everything that I'm saying. But, on the other hand, you know, we think about of like how many times have you been wanting to think of an actor or actress's name or you're trying to learn more information about something you are watching on TV or on your phone and you just it just auto completes it and it's just like it's a great experience from a consumer. To be able to get that information faster. And so, it ultimately is good to the consumer. But, all of this being said, I will say that brands and companies do have a responsibility to their consumers, and to their customers, and to their users. To protect information that's been entrusted to them.   [0:10:19] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:10:19] John Hyman: And not to use it for other purposes that the customers is not necessarily aware of.   [0:10:24] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:10:24] John Hyman: Or I think would be like reasonably able to assume. Like I can reasonable assume that Facebook is going to use my information to show me an advertisement or sell it to some company, but I don't think I'd be reasonably want to assume that they're going sell my information to a political campaign...   [0:10:41] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:10:41] John Hyman: ...to target me...   [0:10:42] PJ Bruno: Jesus.   [0:10:42] John Hyman: ... Based on the interest or things that they have. They even though it may kind of follow naturally if you think about it a little bit more, but I would say that it doesn't seem that reasonable to me. It doesn't seem reasonable to me if I give information to a food delivery service and then they sell that to someone who is now talking to me about... Moving in my area or setting up my electrical utilities or switching cable providers or any of those kind of things.   [0:11:06] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Yeah.   [0:11:06] John Hyman: I wouldn't think those things would naturally follow. But, if I do give information to a delivery service I'm going to want them to show me cool new restaurants I might like or dishes I'm into [crosstalk] or help me reorder things I have ordered recently or remind me that it's snowing tonight and, therefore, I should order in and just be cozy. Those things are a boon for me.   [0:11:25] PJ Bruno: Right. Well, rather you're someone who cares about consent or not, it seems to be not stopping any of the fines that are being put on some of these big companies. I mean, you mentioned it last time we spoke about how like Facebook they're getting fine after fine. Tons of fines, but still posting record profits. So, I guess the question becomes like what's the incentive? Like, how much longer? What's the longevity around the plan of being able to just eat fines and not change your strategy? Right? Because big company right? It's not an easy pivot. So, I guess that's the question. It's like you can tell they did this whole new shift to privacy focus. Like what are your thoughts around that?   [0:12:09] John Hyman: I think that if you want to influence the behavior of companies, there are essential two was of doing it. One, is you can do it through I'll say cultural opinions and attitudes of what's acceptable. This is where we see things like pressure of people talking to having a conversation about what they believe is acceptable or not. Taking to Twitter. Taking to the news and putting social pressure on a company to change. The second part is that you can do it through legislation and regulation and that's really where a government can exercise its power. If you look at companies like Facebook, what you mentioned is fairly true. If you go back to Facebook's Q4 earnings that they announced at the end of January so just about two months ago, we go back to where Facebook was in January you think that they had just come off of you know a crushing amount of different scandals. Their stock price had dropped, I believe, 30 or 40% from its October high. There were a lot of things in the news going on of other people saying that teenagers are leaving Facebook in mass or that advertisers are pulling information from Facebook where there were scandals and it seemed like you're like," Wow! Facebook's really is going to have to do something about this." Then, what they do in Q4 is they just you know had very strong Q4 earnings data. They talked about in January completely beat the expectations of the street and ended up having their stock price go little bit back up. It's not fully recovered where it is, but [inaudible] you do see them performing really well. Though, the fines are a part of it. So, you're looking at fines from Facebook we know that Google I was reading this article that Google pays more in EU fines than it does in taxes. Just kind of a...   [0:13:52] PJ Bruno: That's nuts.   [0:13:53] John Hyman: ... Preposterous thing on principal alone. But, you really want to just try to slowly get these companies to change over time and I think that companies, ultimately, are can become slower moving organizations just like you might see with governments or anything else like that. And but you can slowly recalibrate them to what is acceptable.   [0:14:16] PJ Bruno: Um-hmm.   [0:14:16] John Hyman: And over time they'll be paying these fines and it might just be the cost of doing business. But, a long term strategy is going to be that you can't live in that world forever because you're going to have either the pressure continue to fall on you...   [0:14:31] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:14:31] John Hyman: ...and this is when you see things like Elizabeth Warren making claims that she wants to break up tech companies so we can get to that and talk about that in a moment. But, you also then just have the massive consumer opinion, which will just continue to just fall down on you or have consumers' opinion exploited by companies like Apple who'll then try to push more fines.   [0:14:52] PJ Bruno: It is a sick troll. It is a sick troll.   [0:14:52] John Hyman: Yeah, it is grave by them and they you know Apple actually been a really staunch supporter of increased privacy rights. Because, again, it's a competitive advantage for them. So, I think that over time, in the long term view, they're going to want to make those changes. So, I do think that fines are effective in the long term. I don't think that they're effective in the short term. But, in terms of incentivizing behavior it's a really good way to slowly move the needle there.   [0:15:15] PJ Bruno: So what about tech giants or CEOs informing new legislation because I remember I talked to Susan Wiseman and you know she was our GDP our queen over here as we were going through it and she mentioned that a lot of that legislation had you know was not informed. It was not informed by a specialist. It wasn't informed by tech CEOs or subject matter experts. So I guess my question becomes: A) Should they leverage to help make legislation and B) Is that dangerous because you know having someone who has so much invested in what's going on help create laws that sounds you know somewhat a slippery slope?   [0:15:56] John Hyman: One thing I think is going to be absolutely be true is that... The crafters of this legislation are certainly going to try to use it to maintain a competitive position. So, if you do have Apple having a seat at the table in that conversation they're certainly going to want to do things that allow them to out perform Google. I think you just see this over and over again of just essentially of just lobbying this you're always trying to lobby in your self interest or in your industry's interest or something like that.   [0:16:23] PJ Bruno: Sure.   [0:16:24] John Hyman: All that being said though, the technology's changing in a really fast pace. And so, one of the challenges that comes just in front of any kind of legislation is are you even legislating the things that are relevant to today and also going to be relevant tomorrow? We also have to think about what the world is going to be like if we have self-driving cars or when 5G is everywhere and, therefore, we have in there meta things connected in our homes. There's a lot more things that we want to think about that maybe we to start to legislating. Like I don't even understand all of this information that Alexa is collecting on me at home. But I see cases of Alexa and Amazon being subpoenaed in murder trails and things like that and we got to even answer those questions of like," What's it going to be like when daily life is just so full of sensors and robots and monitors and...?" Perhaps we've already gotten there.   [0:17:15] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:17:16] John Hyman: But, I do think that like the government isn't going to do an effective job at legislating what is going to be effective in the future without talking to the industry. So, I absolutely feel that you have to have industry experts essentially have a seat at the table and just to kind to elucidate this though kind of funny example. If you just go and watch that hearing of Mark Zuckerberg on congress. I mean, it's apparent how woefully ignorant a lot of the politicians are of...   [0:17:44] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:17:44] John Hyman: ... How the Internet works, on how Facebook works, on how really anything in modern technology is actually functioning. So, you want to make sure that you got great experts in there for sure.   [0:17:55] PJ Bruno: So, what else? What's next? What's the future look like? I know that we have this whole California Consumer Protection Act. So, what's the path forward for consumer data protection? What can American legislation do better than Europe has done?   [0:18:10] John Hyman: So, for folks who aren't so familiar with California Consumer Privacy Act I'll give you a little bit of the backstory here. So, we had the EU create GDPR which is their big data protection regulation and this one's effect May 25, 2018. And it allowed citizens of the EU to have a certain number of rights when it comes to their data online. They have the right to amend information that's about them, request information that's being collected on them. Business could only collect data for certain under a certain business reason. Like they had to get other consent or have a valid business concern. You could only collect the information a minimal set of information that you needed to do a job and only had to keep the information around and retain it for as long as you needed and no more than that. And so it really kind of helped businesses kind of one lay out the things that they needed to do and it helped their consumers in the long run. And you saw in 2018 a lot of businesses talk about GDPR. It was kind of the headline of all of the privacy kind of blogs and security blogs. Braze, we hosted a conference on it with some of our partners. I wrote blog posts on this. We had Susan Wiseman, our general counsel, also discussing a lot of GDPR. It was kind of the big news. And then when you look over to the U.S. We still have really nothing comparable when it comes to legislation. So, California took a look at this and said," Look, we can do something about this and we can create our own privacy act that is akin to what the EU citizens have on the GDPR." So, essentially what this would mean then is that California is a state that is going to create legislation that applies only to state residents of California or maybe there's a little more than that. But, essentially only applies in the California jurisdiction. And that would require companies have to understand they need to give different rights to folks in America based on what state they are in. Now, I don't think that that is a great way for us to go about doing privacy and what I mean by that is a state legislated privacy act. Because, if you play that down what you'll find is that you'll end up with a patchwork of different states having their own different legislative agendas and...   [0:20:30] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:20:31] John Hyman: ...and maybe you'll have to do something in the one state. You know even it... just even the concept of states is an incredible concept to me that you could do something that is completely legal in one state and then travel 20 miles across a border and that exact same thing will get you thrown in jail. There are a lot of different cases in America of which we have laws of varying severity and varying degree or laws that things that are legal or not and if you think about that with data it I think that it can really start becoming mind-boggling for what that imposes on business and what that imposes on companies in order to do. So, if you look at the political side of this, you have the Republican Party in the United States that wants to do more of a federal approach. And at the tech companies are also in support of that. So if you look at what these big giants are saying it's like, "Look, like we should really do this at the federal level not at the state because otherwise this is going to start getting a bit challenging for us to do." And that is something that I actually support. I do think and it's not just the Republicans that'll say that there's bipartisan support on wanting to do data privacy on a federal level here in the United States. But, I think that's essentially the right level at which we need to operate.It is we need something that is national that is going to protect people not just in California, but also in North Carolina and...   [0:21:44] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:21:45] John Hyman: ...North Dakota and Texas and in New York.   [0:21:46] PJ Bruno: It's going to get pretty nasty out there.   [0:21:48] John Hyman: We need to have it all essentially be this same thing as this great country of ours have the same protections for all of our citizens. Not just those who happen to live on the sunny side of it.   [0:21:58] PJ Bruno: Gosh. I do wish I lived in California. I will say that. [Laughter]   [0:22:02] John Hyman: Yeah. Every time I go there and then I come back to New York and it's snowing and I just wonder," You know I could be a place where there's great wine and good surfing and beaches and ...   [0:22:12] PJ Bruno: ... And they're thinking data privacy legislation like," That's important to me."   [0:22:15] John Hyman: Yeah. They're in some things ahead of they're time.   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: [Laughter] Well, all right John, well, that's about our time man. Wrapping up, any words to the wise on any companies that could be dealing with user data in the future?   [0:22:29] John Hyman: Well, one thing that I'll just say is I think that the question around privacy is could be just fairly interesting as we move into the future. I was talking a bit about the Internet of things and just really there's a lot of data being collect all around us and, as a consumer, I really would love to just understand what that all is. So, I mentioned Alexa and I have to imagine that Amazon has a different profile of me when I am talking to Alexa than when my wife is talking to Alexa. They must know and have this different personas of okay we got you know they probably figured out how many people are in our house. And also you can then use the things in our house to really track a lot about our lives. I once read some funny article that was something like in Canada they have their water plumbing supply and their plumbers who ever runs their water utility... I don't... It's not the plumbers. But, they have to essentially have someone who manually is kind of sitting at like basically the water power plant and turning up capacity at half-time in hockey games. Because in Canada everyone's watching the hockey game and then it goes to commercial break or goes to half-time and then everyone goes and uses the restroom.   [0:23:48] PJ Bruno: Ah.   [0:23:49] John Hyman: And everyone flushed at the same time. And they need they have like 10 or 20x the amount of like water pressure that they need to push down there. The reason that I bring up this crazy example is because if you think about all if you just think about that as a thing then you play if forward and think well if you had a sensor on every time a flushed the toilet, you had a sensor on when I turned on the gas on my stove, or when turned on the television , or when I told Alexa to turn on the lights in my living room you could map out everything that I'm doing in my apartment. And I think that it's going to be fairly interesting to think about like what it's going to be like in the world where a lot of different companies can accurately map out what you're doing. Even now just with a phone in my pocket, I know that Google and Facebook have a lot of information about me. If I walk... Go between here and the restaurant and I'm having dinner tonight I sure they're going to know did I run? Did I walk? Did I take a bike? Did it take the subway? Did I take a car? They really could kind of track you back through that. And it's one thing where you got this giant these giant tech companies that really are the most valuable companies in the world that have this information and we're hoping, at least I'm hoping as a consumer, that they're good stewards of that as best as they can and protected as best as they can. But, there will be other companies that then start to get this information. They'll be my utility companies that'll start maybe track or and perhaps it will be like Ford or General Motors as they have a self-driving car and then they know all this other information of what's going on in the car. You know, perhaps the other vendors inside my apartment or my house and I think that really the next thing that we need to just make sure that we're thinking about is just holistically what's going to happen when just have so much data about us available that's very granular that can really paint this whole picture of who you are and what are we going to have to do as a society in order to deal with that. So, and so I think that that is going to be like a kind of fairly interesting next step as we go into the Internet of things and we look at legislation. I think that's really going to be the only way to solve it is make sure that we have tight legislation on all of that different kinds of data there. But, it's just something that I think is one is exciting. I think that it's exciting that we're going to have these things or these pieces of technology in our lives. But, we need to just make sure that it won't be done irresponsibility.   [0:26:09] PJ Bruno: Yeah, and I hope it is. It's up to you lawmakers. We're looking at you. John, thanks so much for being here.   [0:26:15] John Hyman: Yeah. I had a great time. Thanks so much.   [0:26:16] PJ Bruno: And thank you guys for being here with us. Take care. [0:26:19]

Jared Dent, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy and Ops at Turner, sits down with Myles Kleeger, President/CCO at Braze to chat March Madness -- from reminiscing the glory days to top picks for the tourney! Many brands use the vehicle of this tournament to bolster engagement with customers. Jared also gave us insight into Turner's marketing strategy in the new world: a multi-screen, streaming, Teamcast NCAA experience.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hello there again this is PJ Bruno, welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. I am thrilled to have with my today two good friends Myles Kleeger, our president and CCO at Braze; and also Jared Dent whose marketing strategy and operations at Turner. Welcome Jared. Welcome Myles. As you know, March madness is upon us. Today kicks off the sweet 16, feeling the jitters a little bit, you see people in the office wearing their shirts; it's all about those bragging rights, right? How we feeling? Anxiety? Joy? Myles, I know you've got some butterflies.   [0:00:57] Myles: Yeah, for full discloser here, I'm a blue devil, in case anyone didn't know. I'm still actually recovering from Sunday's events which were thrilling and horrifying all at once.   [0:01:13] PJ Bruno: That was a close one. You're a big Zion guy, I guess right?   [0:01:18] Myles: Yeah, I am a huge Zion guy, I love this Duke team, I love all Duke teams, but I particularly love this Duke team; we can talk more about that if you'd like. But, the thought of this season coming to an early and unfortunate ending this past Sunday; was honestly something I couldn't really fathom. As I was watching it unfold, it's been meant to be this year in a lot of ways, but then all of a sudden, we were going to lose. We should have lost that game, on multiple levels. But those guys, one of the reasons I love them, is they have a will to win that I have rarely seen, and that's what makes them special. They just don't back down from anyone or anything.   [0:02:01] PJ Bruno: It was a wake up call at least, right? It's kind of like okay, now it's time to get moving.   [0:02:03] Myles: Yeah, so I'm kinda old, but when I was a sophomore, lets go way back to 1995, I think was around the last time Georgia Tech was relevant.   [0:02:13] PJ Bruno: 2004, final four championship game, thank you.   [0:02:19] Myles: Nice, actually we didn't make it to the finals that year, we lost in the final four. Exactly. But if anyone remembers 1995 UCLA Tias Edney, he literally ran down the court in like 1.2 seconds, hit a layup to win the game, I think it was the first round. Would have been a monster upset, they win and then they coast the rest of the way, and I think all great championship teams have to survive that moment of adversity, and I'd like to think that last Sunday was our moment. We will see.   [0:02:48] PJ Bruno: So ideally the hard part is over, and now we're just going to strengthen out, cruise through to the finals. Zion, I gotta say, when a man is busting out of his sneaks, it's time to leave the college game and go to the pros, you know?   [0:03:03] Myles: Yeah, and there's a lot of speculation out there that he's going to get the biggest sneaker contract in the history of sneaker contracts. Largely because Nike can't afford to not sign him. If you think about it, if he does not sign with Nike, everyone will say, Oh he doesn't trust them the shoes aren't good enough for him, they have to get him. Which means he is going to cash in.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: Jared, you got a horse in the race as this point? Anything you looking for?   [0:03:27] Jared: As Myles eluded to Georgia Tech not being in the tournament, especially or the last couple years now, it's been more about work for me and enjoying some of those close games.   [0:03:38] PJ Bruno: That's good.   [0:03:40] Jared: Yeah, we're struggling a little bit right now.   [0:03:42] PJ Bruno: Well you know I got a surprise for you Myles, I am actually a Virginia Tech, alum.   [0:03:46] Myles: Are you really?   [0:03:47] PJ Bruno: I went to three different undergrads. I went to University of Delaware, Notre Dame, and Virginia Tech.   [0:03:51] Myles: Wow, interesting and Delaware and Notre Dame are both coached by former Duke assistants, by the way.   [0:03:57] PJ Bruno: [inaudible] lets go. All right so I got love for you man. We wish you the best.   [0:04:03] Myles: Well thank you, I'll be there tomorrow night.   [0:04:05] PJ Bruno: You're gonna be there?   [0:04:05] Myles: Yeah heading down to D.C. In the morning. And I don't intend to come back until very late Sunday.   [0:04:11] PJ Bruno: That's a true fan. Well all right, lets get into it, shall we? March madness, obviously be all have our memories and what not, and obviously Jared, working at Turner, he's had to work very closely with it for the past...   [0:04:26] Jared: This is year nine as part of the Turner NCAA relationship. Everyone asks me, Is it crazy? Is it mayhem going on? And I'd say, yes but, after nine years it's sort of a normal, a normal life.   [0:04:40] PJ Bruno: Normal stress right? It's the best time of year.   [0:04:44] Jared: You know what you're walking into, you know what you're planning entails, you know what the execution is going to look like. It's certainly mayhem, madness if you will.[inaudible]   [0:04:54] PJ Bruno: You're actually one of the few whose allowed to say march madness, you don't have to come up with...   [0:05:00] Jared: Some way around that, yeah. It's exciting. Year nine of the deal. I've been there the whole time, this is my thirteenth year at Turners. It's just a giant tin pole for us that we certainly get really excited about, that we put a lot of our energy and effort into. It's an event that truly is, it's big right?   [0:05:21] PJ Bruno: Obviously it's the biggest college tournament but it's also seasonal event that's an opportunity for any brand to take advantage of to bolster engagement. When march comes around, I know two things to be certain. One, I am going to bail on lent about a week into it and two, it's march madness and I'll probably lose some money.   [0:05:42] Jared: Sometimes those things are correlated.   [0:05:46] PJ Bruno: This year I'm giving it up. But yeah, cool thing is, we see a lot of companies taking advantage of it, obviously the restaurant industry with all of their free delivery party packs. Cool thing for adobe analytics, their hack the bracket technology, stats compiled from 56,000 colleges. Last year they only offered 50,000 rows of data, this year 3.5 million rows of data. So you can get your hands in that and try to inform your bracket. My favorite one we've seen thus far, Buffalo Wild Wings has introduced the jewel stool. A custom bar stool with a cooling system built into the seat and this recognizes a reported rise in vasectomies during the NCAA basketball tournament; when thousands of men schedule the procedure to coincide march madness so they can spend their doctor ordered rest time watching games.   [0:06:35] Jared: True story, I have a friend who had a vasectomy timed around it. Full disclosure, I have not had a vasectomy, however, last year I tore my ACL skiing; conveniently had surgery the day before the NCAA tournament so I literally saw every single minute of the tournament last year. It was magical. I was in a lot of pain, but I was also in a lot of joy.   [0:07:02] Myles: I read that stat, it was something like Athena health reported that in 2017 vasectomies increased as much as 30% during march madness. That's nuts though. I thought it was more like, you know what? My college team is doing so bad, I just don't want to procreate anymore. I thought the motive was a little different.   [0:07:25] Jared: There's gotta be easier ways to take a couple days off to watch some basketball I have to imagine.   [0:07:30] PJ Bruno: So after the past your almost 13 years at Turner, Jared, what kind of strategies and promotions stick out to you at Turner for this time of the year?   [0:07:41] Jared: Yeah I think that for this, the scope and scale of it is one thing; so what truly has been a challenge for us, especially in the beginning, is that you probably didn't know where Truth was on your t.v. Dial right? No knock to Truth, I love them, Impractical Jokers fan, for sure. But I think that was one of the biggest things, is that CBS had the tournament solo for so long, so how do we become that destination as well, so a lot of it is really just putting the TBS, the TNT, Truth logo associating that with march madness; I think that in the beginning that certainly was the challenge. Outside of that, where we are at now is, we're trying to be everywhere you want to watch the tournament. Really trying to be fan driven. We're on some 17 different platforms you can stream march madness.   [0:08:40] PJ Bruno: YouTube now, right?   [0:08:41] Jared: Yeah, everywhere right? And so we're trying to be across all those devices, we're trying to be there for the fan; because we understand that certainly, we want you to watch on TNT, we want you to watch on TBS but the tournaments going on; unless you've had a vasectomy you're not going to be in front of a T.V the whole time. So, we wanna make sure we're on whatever platform you want to watch on, we wanna make sure the app, we wanna make sure you're on your connected device, whatever it is. So I think, that's sort of the biggest transition that we've moved to; from just exposing us as part of it for TBS and TNT, to truly being on whatever platform you want. And you have access to the tournament and you can watch and enjoy.   [0:09:22] PJ Bruno: Also, just on top of that too, creating some almost fresh content formats around, obviously the game is the game; but I know after the miraculous Duke comeback last weekend there was 5 minute clip you guys put together that basically, on the march madness on demand app, that basically compressed or condensed the end of that game into a 5 minute thing you could watch on the go. Which was awesome for people who are not huge passionate fans they can get pulled into the drama of it and then become a fan from there.   [0:09:59] Jared: Did you guys do your brackets? Do you guys have brackets in eh wild?   [0:10:03] PJ Bruno: Of course. And who do you have going all the way?   [0:10:08] Myles: I might have Duke going all the way, you might want to fact check that one.   [0:10:12] PJ Bruno: I will check you on that.   [0:10:15] Jared: I'll admit, first off NCAA.com the official bracket of march madness, plug there. But I will admit I have Duke going all the way as well, but I will cavi ant that as a warning, I do a bracket every year with jyutsu my dad and my brother for 30 years now, I have won one time. So despite the fact of how much college basketball I watch, how invested I am, for whatever recon I cannot pick...   [0:10:43] PJ Bruno: 'cause you pick with your heart.   [0:10:44] Jared: Yeah that's right. Probably too much heart, probably too much ACC bias.   [0:10:47] Myles: Yeah, I have a lot of ACC bias as well.   [0:10:50] Jared: It's looking good right now. 5 out of 6 teams not bad.   [0:10:53] Myles: Better to have ACC bias than PAC 12 bias.   [0:10:56] Jared: Especially right now.   [0:10:57] PJ Bruno: Gotta go with your gut at the end of the day.   [0:10:59] Myles: I'm just curious, who else do you have in the finals?   [0:11:01] Jared: I think I've got that rematch between Duke and UNC. Watching that NACC tournament.   [0:11:06] Myles: Did you know that we have never ever once played in the NCAA tournament.   [0:11:09] Jared: I did not.   [0:11:10] Myles: IN any round, yeah.   [0:11:11] Jared: Wait what?   [0:11:12] Myles: Yeah. Never. We always get put in different brackets and things, or in different regions and it's never worked out that way, so it would be pretty special to see.   [0:11:24] PJ Bruno: Oh man, lets see that. You know what I will say for Duke? Because I am not a huge Duke fan, but JJ Redick now plays for the Sixers.   [0:11:33] Myles: He's all tatted up too.   [0:11:34] PJ Bruno: He's all tatted up, he's got his own podcast.   [0:11:36] Myles: He's transformed through the years.   [0:11:37] PJ Bruno: He has. He's such a leader, right? I mean I just love to see him out there. Go Sixers. Anyways, it is pretty cool though that the idea of the bracket, obviously there's the official place to get your brackets, but then there's all these other brands that are leveraging the idea of the bracket; and the idea of play, we're going to get you involved. It just seems like such a brilliant technique.   [0:12:00] Jared: The pop culture aspect of march madness, is what ultimately drives it to the level that it is, because college basketball fans are certainly one thing, but if you look at the scope and the scale of march madness; it's because of the casual fan coming in and being truly invested, where they may watch the super bowl, but their not nearly as invested. Something about those brackets really just draws people in. They've got skin in the game, and it just feels like anybody can win. My brother watches no college basketball whatsoever, can pick a bracket that beats me, consistently. It hurts but.   [0:12:39] Myles: I don't know if that says more about you or less about him but it deodorant real matter. [inaudible] the casual fan part of it, I agree is what makes it so special. We're here in New York here right now and we've rarely had regionals here but a few years ago we had one, I know we have one coming up next year; but it's just so fun to bring people in from all over the country, sporting their colors walking around the streets. It's just a fun vibrant, it's just like Saint Patrick Day every day, when this is going on. People are just happy.   [0:13:09] Jared: Until they lose.   [0:13:10] Myles: Yeah, but even then, it's just like you're part of something bigger, though. Which is really cool. Even around the office here. Yeah like people rocking gonzaga t-shirts, they don't wear gonzaga t-shirts very often around here, but they feel compelled to do so now.   [0:13:23] PJ Bruno: It's pretty rad, and so now lets talk more about Turner specifically. Cause all these brands are tacking advantage but Turner, I mean in the past decade we've just seen so many changes, we've seen so many transitions across multiple screens, you've got streaming, Myles mentioned team cast, right? So, how is the cross channel marketing really changed the game for you guys?   [0:13:46] Jared: Yeah, for us, certainly team cast is a great example, what we try to bring to the table, no knock to CBS, they're great partners with us, is that we're constantly trying to innovate, we're trying to bring that cross channel. Trying to put in front of people, new kinds of content, new ways to interact, because if you look at the media landscape, it's changing. There are certainly lots of different ways to consume it, whether it's a condensed game like you mentioned, whether it's through the eyes of some of our talent, I think that's something that's unique that we can bring to the table.   [0:14:22] Myles: Charles Barkley is unique.   [0:14:23] Jared: Right, for sure. And like you mentioned, team cast. SO every year the way our deal works is that every other year we rotate the final four with CBS. So this is an off year for us, so this is CBS final four. So you won't see team cast this year, but you will see it back next year. We see growth, we've seen people are starting to understand what those destinations are and that they're able to find something that's unique to what their looking for. Certainly the innovation trying to be cross channel, has made us change the game. You can't just say tune into TNT and that's it. That can't be your only message.   [0:15:01] PJ Bruno: Absolutely, and for me the whole team cast, being able to watch the game through the perspective of your team, I didn't realize how valuable that was until I watched last years Superbowl, Eagles versus the Patriots, and listening to the commentators because I am a birds fan, I was like, why am I hearing it through this New England perspective through the whole game. It kind of like sullied it for me a little bit.   [0:15:27] Jared: Yeah I agree. There's a big anti Duke bias in the media. Particularly guys like Thor Rafter, he's great, but I think sometimes there's a lot of, people try to compensate because they say, that their such Duke homers, I think sometimes people try to go the opposite direction so they are not accused of being a Duke homer. So, I'm sitting there listening to it, I'm like really? Come on. That was so not a foul. It irritates me sometimes. SO having that opportunity of hearing the different perspectives of broadcasters is really cool.   [0:16:03] PJ Bruno: That's what we want man.   [0:16:05] Jared: I think from a marketing standpoint too what's been big for us is because we are a cross channel, the way we're marketing is really about making real time decisions, so were integrating live scores, live feeds into our ad placements, wherever they are. If its a billboard, if it's an ad online, where ever were connected, we're trying to integrate, give you that sense of, you're missing out right now. And then what we're doing Is making real time decisions on what's driving people where. How are people then going from our ad placements out there, and are they downloading the app, are they streaming online are they going to a connected device? Then make decisions real time is that funnel working or do we need to move our dollars somewhere else. So that's sort of getting into the nitty gritty.   [0:16:56] PJ Bruno: Yeah those live scores, man that's huge. Thats big   [0:16:59] Jared: But that's a big component of it right? So its driving that immediate urgency for consumers to go, I can't miss this, and then also making sure we're getting that message effectively in the right place.   [0:17:10] PJ Bruno: Awesome, two of the things we talk a ton about here at Braze, and we're always thinking about is, personalization in automation. More and more marking departments, marketing companies need to think about this stuff. So, from where you're sitting for almost the past 13 years, what are some of the most game changing automation personalization pieces that you've seen at Turner?   [0:17:35] Jared: I mean for sure it's the growth, the ability to use data, and the ability to truly attract your marketing [inaudible], and get effective attribution. I think that the game changer. No longer is it just were buying radio spots and we're buying TV spots and we're just gonna run them and fingers crossed everything goes well. Really its that knowing who we're talking to, knowing what type of message that should be based on the data. Is this a casual fan? Cause then its probably more about brackets then don't miss this game. Or to be honestly maybe this year, more about, you gotta see Zion. If you're a casual fan, you're probably tuning in for Zion, that's whats driving in a lot of instances. But if you're hardcore it's about here's the whole tournament, here's every which way you can watch it and get connected to it. It's making those decisions based on knowing the consumers. I think that's where the marketplace and marketing is driving to; more technology based more data driven, it's more attribution. It's no longer the old school mad men style.   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: I'm curious Jared, as kind of purveyors of all things tournament related and visibility in so much data. For your corporate champions and your key sponsors, we all know who they are, do you provide that layer of consecrative advice to them, in terms of what types of activations might be most effective for them?   [0:19:02] Jared: For sure. I think we look to partner with them in way that are going to be effective for them. Ultimately, that's valuable for us. Our partners are happy if they are seeing success, then we're happy as well because that drives revenue on our end at the end of the day. So, it certainly is partnering with them it's helping them understand our data, our consumers that we have access to, so we can help draw those activations. Some of them may be activations that we then actively pursue a brand that we say what we're doing here aligns with you. Aligns with what you're looking for.   [0:19:39] PJ Bruno: Huge, makes sense. Wow, I mean, this has been a great time you guys. I wish your teams the best of luck. Virginia Tech, give them hell. But at the end of the day...   [0:19:49] Jared: You took us down a month ago.   [0:19:51] PJ Bruno: Yeah, yeah. But now I mean it's for keeps.   [0:19:54] Myles: And the big guy wasn't on the floor.   [0:19:57] PJ Bruno: That's true. Well, hey Myles, we wish you the Best of luck, no matter what. Thanks for being here. Jared thank you so much for flying up, hanging out with us.   [0:20:04] Jared: Myles, I'll tell you real quick, just because you'll appreciate this, since we were talking about Turner experience. I love my job, and sort of the reason is that I get to travel to some of these events. I'll be in Minneapolis for the final four there.   [0:20:18] Myles: I hope to see you there.   [0:20:19] Jared: That's right. You'll appreciate this as a Duke fan, I was at the Villanova North Carolina final. And I look and probably a couple rows in front of me just off to the right is Michael Jordan watching that game. I mean that's huge right, being a basketball fan. That's amazing. SO I almost watched the game through his eyes just to see how is he reacting to everything that's going on, and when that Villanova buzzer beater went in and literally you could see the pain in Michael. So I know as a Duke fan to see the tar hills fall that way makes you feel a little better inside.   [0:21:03] Myles: It does, it does. Everyone's going to face their time in that position, you know? I've been there before. I do like to root for the ACC overall. Accept if it's Carolina.   [0:21:15] PJ Bruno: Well, if you guys to make it to the final four together, make sure to snap a picture for us.   [0:21:19] Myles: By the way, the activation you guys do on site of the final four is ridiculous. I was at Indianapolis in '15, it was so impressive.   [0:21:28] Jared: We've got a log of stuff in store this year in Minneapolis. SO we are excited about it. That's another thing of turning this into a bigger cultural event.   [0:21:37] PJ Bruno: Its an experience, right.   [0:21:39] Jared: It is an experience. It has to feel wrapped around the game.   [0:21:43] PJ Bruno: In a lot of ways its the Superbowl of college. All right, well thanks for being with us, y'all. This is Myles Kleeger, Jared Dunn, and PJ Bruno wishing you happy brackets. [0:21:53]

Product professionals Diana Kim and Sarah Wilson give me the scoop on SXSW 2019. DK sat on a panel with Maria Menounos and the Female Quotient to talk personalization. Sarah saw every female-fronted band she could get her eyeballs on. Listen in to hear about the great food, scooter saturation, and meeting celebrities.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello there again. This is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest, and I'm thrilled to be with two very good friends today. We have Diana Kim; hello, Diana.   [0:00:30] Dianna Kim: Hello.   [0:00:32] PJ Bruno: And also, we have Sara Wilson. Both product girls. DK, a product manager, and Sara, a product designer. Hi, Sara.   [0:00:39] Sara Wilson: Hey!   [0:00:40] PJ Bruno: How you guys doing? So, I have them with me because they're fresh off of South by Southwest. They're here; we missed you guys, first of all.   [0:00:47] Sara Wilson: Aw.   [0:00:47] PJ Bruno: The whole office just felt empty without your energy. But I gotta ask. South by Southwest: I want to hear it all. Firstly though, it's Austin. It's South by Southwest. It's 2019. Was it just CBD everything, down there? Was it just-   [0:01:03] Sara Wilson: [crosstalk] There was a good amount of it.   [0:01:04] PJ Bruno: Yeah?   [0:01:05] Dianna Kim: Yes.   [0:01:05] PJ Bruno: CBD toilet paper. CBD fidget spinners.   [0:01:08] Sara Wilson: They just handed it to you when you walked off the plane.   [0:01:10] PJ Bruno: Right, exactly. "Welcome! Get weird. Here."   [0:01:11] Sara Wilson: Yeah, "Open your mouth, take a drop." Yep.   [0:01:14] Dianna Kim: I did go to a Viceland party. It was called Skateland, and a bunch of people were roller skating, and there was a bus there. And I was by myself, and I went into the bus, and people were just rolling up joints and doing a lot of CBD oil, and I was like, "What did I just get myself into?"   [0:01:30] PJ Bruno: You were like-   [0:01:30] Dianna Kim: Just immediately walked out. I was-   [0:01:32] PJ Bruno: Hello?   [0:01:33] Dianna Kim: Hello? Hello?   [0:01:34] Sara Wilson: What are you guys doing in here?   [0:01:35] Dianna Kim: I felt like the lost child, like I just didn't belong.   [0:01:40] Sara Wilson: But for real, when I got off the plane and was waiting for a cab, I thought it was going to be Fyre Festival-   [0:01:45] PJ Bruno: Oh no!   [0:01:45] Sara Wilson: Because it was a line, of like one hundred people, and it took forty-five minutes to wait for a cab, and I was like, "If I get to my Airbnb, and it's a wet mattress, I'm going to be really mad."   [0:01:54] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:01:54] Sara Wilson: But like-   [0:01:55] PJ Bruno: Where's my luxury?   [0:01:56] Sara Wilson: Yeah, but, thankfully, it was a really nice Airbnb. And a really nice week.   [0:02:01] PJ Bruno: Lovely! Well, let's jump right into it! What do we got here? First off, I do need to hear about Nancy from Stranger Things, because that's been driving me crazy.   [0:02:10] Sara Wilson: Oh boy! What a night. We were out-   [0:02:13] PJ Bruno: Oh, what a night.   [0:02:13] Sara Wilson: We were out Saturday night, and ran into some celebrities, and-   [0:02:18] PJ Bruno: Pretty standard.   [0:02:18] Sara Wilson: Yeah, so we saw Nancy, from Stranger Things-   [0:02:22] PJ Bruno: Who I like.   [0:02:22] Sara Wilson: And then I guess one of the girls from 13 Reasons Why was also out, but I haven't seen it, so I didn't recognize her.   [0:02:28] PJ Bruno: Were they at South by Southwest for events? Or they just, were down there, hanging?   [0:02:32] Dianna Kim: So, looking back, I think that they were having events, but I did not hear about them.   [0:02:38] Sara Wilson: Yeah, it was pretty much a drive by, take a picture, and then keep moving.   [0:02:42] Dianna Kim: Yeah.   [0:02:42] PJ Bruno: Okay.   [0:02:43] Sara Wilson: They weren't interested in being friends, sadly.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: Aw.   [0:02:45] Sara Wilson: But I still have a picture.   [0:02:47] PJ Bruno: The picture tells a different story.   [0:02:49] Sara Wilson: It proves that-   [0:02:50] Dianna Kim: Best friends for life; BFFs.   [0:02:51] PJ Bruno: Firstly, it proves that.   [0:02:52] Sara Wilson: Did it really happen if there's not a picture on my Instagram? I don't know.   [0:02:57] PJ Bruno: I'm always asking myself that question. The humidity? Was that a gross thing?   [0:03:01] Sara Wilson: Oh, first impression: my hair grew like three inches when I stepped off the plane.   [0:03:05] PJ Bruno: Oh!   [0:03:06] Sara Wilson: Yeah. It was a constant battle to get my hair to con-   [0:03:10] Dianna Kim: I just gave up.   [0:03:10] Sara Wilson: Yeah.   [0:03:11] PJ Bruno: You're like, "No."   [0:03:12] Sara Wilson: Yeah, I turned it into, just, frizzy pigtails. I just gave into it.   [0:03:16] Dianna Kim: [inaudible]   [0:03:16] PJ Bruno: I like that look, though.   [0:03:17] Sara Wilson: Yeah, it worked.   [0:03:19] PJ Bruno: It works down there, I think.   [0:03:21] Sara Wilson: And, I can say that I am still bloated from all the food.   [0:03:24] Dianna Kim: Barbecue. So great.   [0:03:26] Sara Wilson: Barbecue, donuts, tacos.   [0:03:27] PJ Bruno: And it was just, stands are trucks? They're big into trucks there, or no?   [0:03:31] Sara Wilson: Trucks, restaurants-   [0:03:32] Dianna Kim: Yes.   [0:03:32] PJ Bruno: Food trucks?   [0:03:33] Sara Wilson: Everything.   [0:03:34] Dianna Kim: Yup. We didn't make it to the Salt Lick, which is about forty minutes outside of the city, and that's the place you go to for barbecue, but we heard that- Just, given, we didn't have a car, we had to get an Uber, that would have been like a hundred dollars, one way! And the line would've been ridiculous, so we decided not to.   [0:03:52] Sara Wilson: Yeah, we passed. And there's enough good food inside Austin-   [0:03:54] Dianna Kim: Yeah.   [0:03:55] Sara Wilson: That, we ate plenty good, all day, every day.   [0:03:56] PJ Bruno: Right. And they had, you know. South by Sex- Southwest. Ugh. "South by Southsex" actually has a lot of great food, and humidity, but it has other things, too, right?   [0:04:08] Sara Wilson: Yeah! Like what?   [0:04:09] PJ Bruno: That's what I'm asking you guys! Tell me what's up!   [0:04:11] Sara Wilson: There was a lot of good music. I'm-   [0:04:13] PJ Bruno: You were stocking out all of it.   [0:04:14] Sara Wilson: I'm a music-   [0:04:15] Dianna Kim: She was there for two weeks!   [0:04:16] Sara Wilson: Well, like nine days. Yeah, I'm kind of a music snob, and so I had my big list, and I still feel like I could've gone and seen like fifty more bands, and I'm still kicking myself for it, but I just want to say, there were so many awesome female artists up there. That was the majority of what I saw, were really strong female frontwomen, and that was so dope. King Princess, she's amazing. Ratboys is one of my favorites; I've seen them like four times in the past year. Emily Blue is from my hometown; she was super dope. There were just, band after band, that were just so dope, and that's kind of the heart of South by Southwest.   [0:04:50] PJ Bruno: You introduced me to a lot of new music, because, just watching your story, I was like, "Oh, gotta check that out, gotta check that out too!"   [0:04:56] Sara Wilson: I'm currently building a playlist of all the things I saw and heard about but didn't make it to at South by, so stay tuned. I can share out that playlist.   [0:05:03] PJ Bruno: Everyone stay tuned for that South by Southwest playlist.   [0:05:06] Sara Wilson: I'm pretty big on making my playlists.   [0:05:08] PJ Bruno: What about the work stuff? We did work stuff, too, right? Or was it all dancing, and-   [0:05:13] Dianna Kim: Work hard, play hard.   [0:05:14] PJ Bruno: And CBD.   [0:05:14] Sara Wilson: Well, Dianna's not going to toot her own horn, so I will. She was on this really dope panel at the Female Quotient, and-   [0:05:22] PJ Bruno: Dope, dope.   [0:05:22] Sara Wilson: It was just super dope. It was just this amazing moment, to see her sitting up-   [0:05:26] Dianna Kim: Thank you.   [0:05:27] Sara Wilson: Among these powerful women-   [0:05:30] Dianna Kim: And a celebrity.   [0:05:31] Sara Wilson: And a celebrity!   [0:05:32] Dianna Kim: Not me. Of course.   [0:05:33] PJ Bruno: And, I'm a celebrity!   [0:05:36] Sara Wilson: Tell everybody how you made buddies!   [0:05:38] Dianna Kim: Oh yeah, no, so the Female Quotient, awesome organization, and, Shelley, the CEO of the Female Quotient, is really good friends with Maria Menounos, who is a reporter, on E!, and, so, I see this beautiful woman, just walking by with her glam squad, and I'm like, "What is she doing here?" And, next thing you know, they're pulling up another chair next to me; I'm like, "Oh. She is-"   [0:06:02] Sara Wilson: Gonna be in it.   [0:06:02] Dianna Kim: She is right here with us, in it.   [0:06:04] PJ Bruno: Oh, she's here to talk shop. Okay.   [0:06:05] Dianna Kim: Yeah! And I didn't realize all the things that she did. She has an organization called Rally, which seems awesome. She's also building a platform for the ESPN of after-show buzzworthy stuff. But it was very intimidating, being on a panel with her. She's so well-spoken, very polished. And also, I didn't realize that she survived brain cancer, so, after we're doing our introductions-   [0:06:31] Sara Wilson: And her mom, too.   [0:06:32] Dianna Kim: Yeah, and her mom! So, after we're doing introductions, they're like, "Okay, tell us something that you wouldn't say on LinkedIn." And so she said that, and I'm sitting here, like, "What am I going to follow this up with?" And the first thing that came out of my mouth was, "I'm a cat mom."   [0:06:49] PJ Bruno: Wait, the prompt was, "What would you not post on LinkedIn?"   [0:06:52] Dianna Kim: Yeah, like, "Tell my about yourself."   [0:06:53] PJ Bruno: Well, that's accurate.   [0:06:54] Dianna Kim: Yeah. I guess, maybe I would say that on LinkedIn. Would that, [inaudible] third job-   [0:06:58] PJ Bruno: I feel like the scope of things I wouldn't say on LinkedIn is vast! [crosstalk] You really could've picked a lot of things out of the dark and hit bullseye.   [0:07:05] Dianna Kim: Right?   [0:07:05] Sara Wilson: That's pretty harmless.   [0:07:06] Dianna Kim: And I had to keep it pretty PG, for the audience.   [0:07:09] PJ Bruno: Right, exactly, so it narrowed the scope a bit.   [0:07:12] Dianna Kim: But great conversation, with her. She had, actually, a lot of input on personalization and how it impacts with technology, and we bonded over dominoes. Apparently, she loves dominoes, and I do, too, so that worked out.   [0:07:24] PJ Bruno: So, best friends!   [0:07:26] Dianna Kim: Best friends.   [0:07:26] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I've never seen her outside of a taxicab television, trying to sell me some sort of television program. But, she seems fantastic. I'm glad she was there for the Female Quotient. That's rad.   [0:07:39] Dianna Kim: Yeah, it was really cool.   [0:07:40] PJ Bruno: Cool! Also, what else? Bumble?   [0:07:43] Sara Wilson: Yeah, we went, and saw a number of pop-up shops, or takeovers, and, I think that there was a strong theme of human experiences, not only in the talk tracks, but also just in what brands were doing at South by. Like Bumble took over this coffee shop, and they were handing out free coffee. Because they're not just giving you a free pen, or a bag. It wasn't just handing out free stuff that you don't need. It was about giving you an experience and bringing people together.   [0:08:11] PJ Bruno: Right, right. But at the coffee shop pop-up, somehow the women needed to start the conversation, or something, or?   [0:08:17] Sara Wilson: Surprisingly, no.   [0:08:19] PJ Bruno: No?   [0:08:19] Dianna Kim: So, I actually texted my boyfriend before this, because you needed to download the app, in order to get in, and I was like, "Just to let you know, I'm downloading Bumble, I'm not here to date," but, when you download it, you can actually go for networking, which I didn't know.   [0:08:31] PJ Bruno: Yeah, big time!   [0:08:32] Dianna Kim: And for friends!   [0:08:33] PJ Bruno: Exactly. Roxy Rosales did that, that one night.   [0:08:37] Dianna Kim: I thought it was a cool experience. I think the question I have for brands, as a performance marketer, in my previous role: I'm like, "How much do these things cost, and does it actually have an output?" And it seems really, really cool, to be there for the interactive experience, but, I'm always curious to what the ROI is [crosstalk]-   [0:08:54] PJ Bruno: Exactly. So, did you get your questions answered, somewhat, by that?   [0:08:59] Dianna Kim: No.   [0:08:59] PJ Bruno: You just continue to-   [0:09:00] Dianna Kim: I mean, we saw the Bumble thing, which is really cool. No puppies, though.   [0:09:04] Sara Wilson: There were supposed to be puppies. We missed the puppies. We did see puppies-   [0:09:07] PJ Bruno: Oh, they advertised puppies.   [0:09:08] Dianna Kim: Yeah, they advertised puppies. And free coffee.   [0:09:11] Sara Wilson: But there were puppies at Madewell. Which, doesn't make much sense, but there's a good picture of Diana with a cute little puppy.   [0:09:18] Dianna Kim: Yes, yes.   [0:09:20] PJ Bruno: Aw. Which you can see, right here, if you guys can see at home. There it is. Good. Sorry.   [0:09:29] Dianna Kim: We also got free food, from Uber Eats. They had a pop-up shop. They flagged us; we were walking by, and they were like, "If you show us you have the app downloaded, we'll give you free-" What was it.   [0:09:39] Sara Wilson: Popeye's, or something? Fried chicken?   [0:09:41] Dianna Kim: Oh, yes. And it was right after we had lunch, too. So, I love Popeye's chicken.   [0:09:46] PJ Bruno: There's no way to say no.   [0:09:47] Dianna Kim: Oh, there's no way to say no to a biscuit and some chicken tenders.   [0:09:50] Sara Wilson: I said no, but Diana was like, "We can do it." And we did.   [0:09:53] Dianna Kim: There's always room for more.   [0:09:54] Sara Wilson: There's always room.   [0:09:55] PJ Bruno: Exactly. Don't say that "don't" or "I can't" around me. You can. I know you can.   [0:10:01] Sara Wilson: We just have to work hard enough.   [0:10:01] Dianna Kim: Get rid of that negativity. You can always do it.   [0:10:04] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:10:04] Dianna Kim: But, I think that was a great way to get downloads, or, if you haven't used the app, to actually use it for free stuff. The actual output of that; I loved it. And they actually had ice cream, the next day!   [0:10:14] Sara Wilson: They did. They had different food-   [0:10:15] Dianna Kim: Each day!   [0:10:16] Sara Wilson: Yeah, to bring you in.   [0:10:17] PJ Bruno: Jeez.   [0:10:18] Sara Wilson: Yeah, it was pretty cool.   [0:10:19] PJ Bruno: They know how to get us going.   [0:10:20] Sara Wilson: One of them that didn't require an app download was Facebook. We missed this event; I really wanted to go. Like, every couple hours, they had a screen printing workshop, and it was off in this warehouse, kind of a little bit away from Downtown, and the first fifteen people to come, you could screen print your own bag.   [0:10:36] PJ Bruno: Oh, cool!   [0:10:38] Sara Wilson: And it was a whole workshop where you would learn how to screen print.   [0:10:41] PJ Bruno: That's really fricking cool. I've never heard anything like that, actually.   [0:10:44] Sara Wilson: It's an experience, you get to make something, you get to be proud of it, you get to keep it. And then, that brand, you're going to remember them, every time you use that bag.   [0:10:52] PJ Bruno: Everyone's just going to think fondly of Facebook now, I'm sure.   [0:10:55] Sara Wilson: So fondly.   [0:10:56] Dianna Kim: Hopefully.   [0:10:58] PJ Bruno: I mean, that was the goal, was it not? AI? Personalization?   [0:11:03] Sara Wilson: Yeah, everything was- I looked and there were at least seventy events or talks that had the word AI in the title. We kept going, "What's the difference from this one, from that one?" Because they all had the same title, pretty much. And it's all about, "How do we use AI? How do we personalize everything? How do we make it human?" Which is very on topic. We definitely support that. But it kind of hit a point where we were like, "Is there even anything to take away from this?"   [0:11:33] Dianna Kim: It was saturation of the message. Everyone was talking about the same thing, or, I'm not going to blatantly say which companies were on this panel, but it was just so high level, because they only had [inaudible] or executives on it, that they weren't getting into the actual, "How do you implement AI? How do you [crosstalk] it."   [0:11:49] PJ Bruno: Right. It was just the philosophy behind it. It got very zoomed out.   [0:11:52] Dianna Kim: Yeah, it got kind of tough, in some of the talks. It's definitely a very hot topic right now, but I think that, execution-wise, it could be helpful from a Keynote perspective, or, what I would like to see in the future, more of a Keynote perspective, with someone actually doing this in a meaningful way.   [0:12:09] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Same.   [0:12:10] Sara Wilson: And that's what I can say about the Female Quotient panel that Diana was on. There were a lot of real-life examples, and it was tangible. It was just something that, I walked away, and I felt like, "Oh, I could take that idea, and I could implement that," and it wasn't just a really broad concept of feelgood ideas.   [0:12:16] PJ Bruno: Exactly. You could actually take it and do something with it, right?   [0:12:16] Sara Wilson: Yeah.   [0:12:16] Dianna Kim: The other thing to touch on is the human element, because I feel like, if I saw that in any sort of conference, like ten years ago, I'd be like, "This is weird. Why are we talking about this?" I feel like it's over-exaggeration of how robots are going to take over, but I don't necessarily think that's the case.   [0:12:49] PJ Bruno: Yeah, do you think it's that course-correcting of, "Don't be scared that robots are doing all these things. There's still this human element." It's like a way to alleviate that panic, around, "Oh my god, Skynet knows where I am."   [0:13:01] Dianna Kim: Yeah.   [0:13:02] Sara Wilson: Yeah, I think that was a big part of it, is, they were asking, "How do you teach robots to be human?" And it's like, "Well, behind every bot, or everything that is artificial, is a human!" So, it inherently gets some of that, but there is some amount of correcting that you can do, to make sure that it doesn't just take over.   [0:13:21] PJ Bruno: What's the wildest comment you heard, during one of the- Did you hear anyone being like, "Yes, but how can you assure me that a robot won't take my life at some point?"   [0:13:31] Dianna Kim: Gosh.   [0:13:33] Sara Wilson: I don't think that we heard that at any one talk track.   [0:13:37] PJ Bruno: Because, "There are no stupid comments."   [0:13:40] Sara Wilson: Right. "Everybody's feelings are valid."   [0:13:42] PJ Bruno: But what was the most idiotic thing that you-   [0:13:45] Sara Wilson: People on scooters.   [0:13:47] PJ Bruno: Oh. Okay.   [0:13:48] Sara Wilson: That was the worst thing that we saw, were people on scooters.   [0:13:51] PJ Bruno: Because they're a big scooter-   [0:13:51] Dianna Kim: And we were one of them.   [0:13:53] Sara Wilson: We were-   [0:13:53] Dianna Kim: On a-   [0:13:54] Sara Wilson: Exactly once.   [0:13:55] PJ Bruno: Self-loathing.   [0:13:55] Sara Wilson: And, I have to say, they got me. They were like, "Load twenty dollars into the app." And I was like, "Yeah, dope!" And then I spent, like a dollar fifty, and was too afraid to use some ever again-   [0:14:04] PJ Bruno: Why were you afraid?   [0:14:05] Sara Wilson: Because they're not stable. They go, quickly. You have to ride on the roads. There's a lot of traffic in downtown Austin-   [0:14:13] PJ Bruno: And they're like a scooter town, anyway, so this must have been like-   [0:14:16] Sara Wilson: Like thousands of scooters. They hire people to go and wrangle the scooters, put them in the back of their truck, and take them back.   [0:14:23] PJ Bruno: God. It's like Vietnam.   [0:14:23] Dianna Kim: Yup. It was a lot of scooters and electric bikes.   [0:14:26] Sara Wilson: Yes, the bikes.   [0:14:27] Dianna Kim: I think that, just to get people around the city quicker, I think it makes sense. But, at the same time, not having proper bikes lanes freaked me out. We caused traffic on a pretty busy road, going down a hill.   [0:14:42] Sara Wilson: We just took over the entire lane and turned around and there were like thirty cars backed up behind us, because it's illegal to ride on the sidewalk.   [0:14:50] PJ Bruno: Oh, wow. But, totally legal to ride in the street.   [0:14:53] Sara Wilson: You're supposed to. When you-   [0:14:54] PJ Bruno: You're expected to.   [0:14:55] Sara Wilson: When you download the app, you have to consent to, "These are the rules, I have to ride in the road, these are the certain things I can do."   [0:15:03] PJ Bruno: What about riding on the median? Is there a rule there?   [0:15:06] Dianna Kim: You go for it.   [0:15:07] Sara Wilson: You want to do some tricks? Catch some air?   [0:15:09] PJ Bruno: Exactly. I just want to put my life at risk, for once.   [0:15:13] Sara Wilson: Oh no, I felt like just going straight and flat was enough of putting my life at risk.   [0:15:17] PJ Bruno: I haven't been on one of these. So, these are Birds?   [0:15:20] Sara Wilson: Yeah.   [0:15:21] Dianna Kim: There are a few others.   [0:15:21] Sara Wilson: Lyft has it now, and you can locate them, in the app. It'll say, "Show scooters nearby," and you can go pick one up. One was a Lime brand; there were five or six different brands. They all kind of looked the same.   [0:15:34] Dianna Kim: Jump was another one; I think that was an electric bike service.   [0:15:37] Sara Wilson: Yeah. And then they also had these people on bicycles with the little carts behind them, the pedicabs. Those are dope.   [0:15:45] PJ Bruno: Oh, it's like a rickshaw, right?   [0:15:47] Sara Wilson: Yes!   [0:15:48] PJ Bruno: That's the one. They had those in New York.   [0:15:49] Sara Wilson: Yeah, great service.   [0:15:51] PJ Bruno: Really good?   [0:15:51] Dianna Kim: Oh, so great. So cheap. It was like five dollars.   [0:15:54] PJ Bruno: Because in New York, they cost an arm and a leg, I think.   [0:15:57] Dianna Kim: Do they?   [0:15:57] PJ Bruno: Yeah, because I think they romanticize, like, "Ah, take in the city, don't [crosstalk] of a car!"   [0:16:02] Dianna Kim: Well, in Central Park, yeah. No, this was five bucks, we got a nice breeze in our hair. It was just wonderful.   [0:16:08] Sara Wilson: And the music was so good.   [0:16:09] Dianna Kim: He had a speaker. Yeah. It was great.   [0:16:12] PJ Bruno: Excellent. So, outside of DK throwing it down for the Female Quotient, what was your favorite, or most inspirational, thing that you saw? Or took in? On the weekend? I know it was a lot.   [0:16:27] Sara Wilson: I don't know. My answer has to be that panel with Diana. That was-   [0:16:31] Dianna Kim: Aw. Thank you.   [0:16:32] Sara Wilson: That's like, kind of cheesy, but it was just a good moment for Braze. It was a good moment for women. It was a good moment for my good friend. There were just so many great things about it. I was like a proud mama.   [0:16:44] PJ Bruno: I'm getting a little-   [0:16:45] Sara Wilson: I know.   [0:16:45] Dianna Kim: You guys, I'm going to cry.   [0:16:48] Sara Wilson: Aw.   [0:16:48] Dianna Kim: I think that the Female Quotient did a- I'm just going to give them a huge shout-out, because, even the panels before, the one I spoke on and the panel after; they did such a great job with the content. Whether it's the personalization equation, which is what we talked about on my panel, or just looking at diversity, or how men view women in the workplace, which was an all-male panel, afterwards. I think they did such a great job with content generation. And also just diversity, in general, was a big, big theme, at South by Southwest, this year.   [0:17:19] PJ Bruno: It sounds like they nailed it. It sounds like they nailed all the right spots.   [0:17:22] Dianna Kim: Yeah. The one thing I didn't see, though, but I wish I did, but the lines were so long: the Instagram founders were speaking at a Keynote, or like a fireside chat. Just talking about their experience at Facebook and why they left. I think it's a very cool moment to see, because, right now we have a lot of executives leaving Facebook. The Facebook Execudus.   [0:17:45] PJ Bruno: Mm-hmm. Oh, that's not yours? Or that's-   [0:17:48] Dianna Kim: I don't know. Can I take that?   [0:17:50] PJ Bruno: I think so. I'd never heard it.   [0:17:52] Dianna Kim: I'm just going to take it.   [0:17:52] PJ Bruno: Patent pending.   [0:17:53] Sara Wilson: You heard it here, first.   [0:17:55] PJ Bruno: Execudus.   [0:17:55] Dianna Kim: But, it kind of shows, especially with that big of a company, what Mark Zuckerberg's trying to do with the privacy pivot, and how they're really trying to focus on privacy, but is it really more of a PR play? We'll see about that. But I wish I was there to see it, in person.   [0:18:12] PJ Bruno: So, did you get any hot takes? Do we know at all, what they were gawking about? Did they talk a little bit about the-   [0:18:19] Dianna Kim: They lost a lot of autonomy. I feel like-   [0:18:21] PJ Bruno: Right. I read the article that was something like, that was the victory, in a way. Taking that responsibility off, and now they're moving on. It's kind of like, the finality of them now, "Okay. Fully acquired now."   [0:18:33] Sara Wilson: They've done their job.   [0:18:34] Dianna Kim: Goodbye.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: We did it.   [0:18:37] Dianna Kim: I read an article about the WhatsApp CEO, thinking, "No, still delete Facebook, we are our own company." I wonder how long that's gonna last, until Facebook really has their arms fully into the WhatsApp platform. TBD, but we'll see.   [0:18:55] PJ Bruno: The Facebook Execudus. It is so much better as one word.   [0:19:01] Dianna Kim: I'm going to take that.   [0:19:03] PJ Bruno: It's yours! It's yours.   [0:19:04] Dianna Kim: Cool.   [0:19:06] PJ Bruno: Cool. I mean, any predictions for next year's? Do we have anything that we think we'll see? Hopefully, you guys will be back there, next year.   [0:19:15] Dianna Kim: Hopefully.   [0:19:16] Sara Wilson: Yeah, maybe.   [0:19:16] PJ Bruno: Was this your first time going, Sara?   [0:19:17] Sara Wilson: Yes, this was my first time in Austin, first time at South by. All, a lot of firsts. It was great.   [0:19:23] Dianna Kim: I'm trying to think of any shows that are- So Game of Thrones had a huge thing, there. It was like, they had a blood drive. A lot of the content producers put a bunch of stuff on. I'm wondering what show is coming up next year, because I feel like a lot of content producers are going to have huge buyouts of bars, and cool interactive things.   [0:19:43] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it sounds like they're setting the bar, for these cool interactive experiences.   [0:19:49] Sara Wilson: Yeah, bringing celebrities in, and giving you something to take home that you made. Some really cool, innovative things that brands are doing.   [0:19:57] PJ Bruno: Well, South by Southwest, sounds like you're setting the bar. Other conferences, you better get up on that. MAU, we're looking at you.   [0:20:06] Sara Wilson: Check in with Diana after that one.   [0:20:09] Dianna Kim: I'll be there. I'll be there in Vegas.   [0:20:10] PJ Bruno: We will. We'll be there. I'll be there as well! Looking forward to it!   [0:20:14] Sara Wilson: You guys have fun.   [0:20:14] Dianna Kim: I'll be at the crabs table.   [0:20:17] PJ Bruno: Yo, wait, is that the highest odds? The crabs table? It is, right?   [0:20:21] Dianna Kim: I don't know, I just think it's the most fun.   [0:20:23] PJ Bruno: I think it's also best odds in the house, according to Spencer Burke.   [0:20:27] Dianna Kim: Oh, and he knows everything, so.   [0:20:28] PJ Bruno: Well, he knows how to gamble.   [0:20:30] Dianna Kim: I gamble with Spencer.   [0:20:32] PJ Bruno: I'm telling you, you're in good company. I told him I'm not super lucky, but he was like, "You come with me."   [0:20:37] Dianna Kim: Beginner's luck. You'll totally make it.   [0:20:39] PJ Bruno: So excited. Well, I guess we'll see you guys at MAU. MAU, you got something to top, right now. Thanks again for joining us this week, you guys.   [0:20:48] Sara Wilson: Of course, thanks for having us.   [0:20:49] Dianna Kim: Thank you.   [0:20:51] PJ Bruno: This is PJ Bruno, and I'm accompanied by Diana Kim, and also the lovely Sara Wilson. Thank you guys again for being here. Good afternoon, good evening, and good night.   [0:21:01] Sara Wilson: Bye.   [0:21:01] Dianna Kim: Bye. [0:21:01]

Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Omari Matthew put on their aprons and chef hats to get in the zone for this week's topic: The Future of Food. Listen in on trends around the benefits and downfalls of leveraging a third party delivery service, the laboratory-made IMPOSSIBLE burger, and robocar advertising... that's right.. Robocar!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hey again, this is PJ Bruno welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest, and I'm so thrilled today to have two very close friends of mine, and that is Taylor Gibb, Taylor the creator, lovely to see you here.   [0:00:33] Taylor Gibb: Thank you so much, gosh I am flattered, and Taylor the creator, in almost rhyme that I never stumbled across before, so super flattered there.   [0:00:41] PJ Bruno: Absolutely, and also to my right, your left, Omari Matthew, wearing this amazing apron today.   [0:00:48] Omari M.: Yo, what's up you all, how you all doing?   [0:00:50] PJ Bruno: Dude you're so fashion forward I don't even know what to do about it, so I'm like...   [0:00:52] Omari M.: Yo dude, it's just, I don't know, I wake up with it sometimes, I'm just like, I've got to wear the apron.   [0:00:58] Taylor Gibb: For all you listeners at home, nobody does an outfit of the day selfie quite like Omari, in the office bathroom too, just one point.   [0:01:05] Omari M.: I have started trying to count, and at 50 of I try to take a mirror selfie in every bathroom I go into.   [0:01:14] PJ Bruno: Dude, I mean, I got to say, I feel like anytime someone says, "Yo Omari, nice shirt," you're immediately down on one knee, just kind of posing it, it's like a reflex, you're just down, you're like yep, fashion.   [0:01:25] Taylor Gibb: Make it fashion, I love it, I would buy a coffee table book of all of your mirror selfies, I think that you've got a market there.   [0:01:33] PJ Bruno: I want that. Taylor, what are we talking about today? What is this?   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: Guys, I'm so glad that you asked PJ, this week I thought it would be really cool to talk about something super near and dear to my heart, which is food. There have been some really interesting articles out in the news recently just about the future of food. I got a couple of different themes going here, we got what's food going to look like? Is it going to be substantially different from what we see it like today? We've got how are you going to get your food, right? I really very heavily on my Seamless, my Caviar, my Postmates, what's that doing to the industry? Then also just thinking a little bit beyond that, the ways that we get our food are becoming more and more pervasive, more advertising heavy, and when we think about some of these new campaigns running out there in the world, ways for different restaurants to get you to the door, maybe even taking the wheel, a little spoiler there.   [0:02:26] Omari M.: The future of food.   [0:02:28] PJ Bruno: I feel like it belongs in a World Fair, in like-   [0:02:33] Omari M.: Yeah.   [0:02:35] Taylor Gibb: Step right up-   [0:02:35] Omari M.: Just top hat guy.   [0:02:36] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:02:36] Taylor Gibb: It's all on a comb.   [0:02:37] PJ Bruno: Why don't you come on down and see what world will be like in 2020. Awesome, what's this first one?   [0:02:43] Taylor Gibb: That was great, yeah so, first things first, let's talk a little bit about this article, consumers love food delivery, restaurants and grocers hate it. So this article is talking a little bit about how as consumers rely more and more heavily on this on demand food industry, whether it's getting groceries from Jet.com, whether it's getting your pad Thai from the little place around the corner but having someone else bring it to you, which I do. Our habits of consumption are shifting drastically, and I think it's tough for the industry to keep up, so I'm just curious, maybe start with Omari about some of your thoughts about, first of all this article, and about this trend in general?   [0:03:25] Omari M.: Yeah, yo, so the article was immediately drawing to me because I think the first thing that I was pulled out, was that orders are not profitable for the restaurant, and working with these businesses like Postmates, like Grubhub, is not on the long term profitable, but it keeps them there, it keeps them relevant.   [0:03:47] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:03:48] Omari M.: That is super interesting to me because restaurants can't not use something like Grubhub, Postmates for their future, but they have to deal with it unfortunately.   [0:03:58] PJ Bruno: They have to loss money in the near term to keep up with competition, right?   [0:04:02] Omari M.: Exactly.   [0:04:02] Taylor Gibb: Totally, it's everybody's doing it, all the girls in school have the same bag, and maybe you don't even like that bag but you have to have it or else nobody's going to ask you to the prom. I think that's what happened to me, it's just about a bag, right?   [0:04:14] PJ Bruno: They just want to go to the prom, these guys here.   [0:04:15] Taylor Gibb: Everybody here, that's right, and you know who can take them to the prom? Is these third party delivery services that a lot of these restaurants rely on. So you could be the mom-and-pop shop around the corner making meatballs, get really big online, but you don't have the infrastructure in place to have somebody out and making deliveries day in day out, and so a lot of these places rely on these third parties that will take a little bit off the top. Problem is, if your third party isn't reliable, if your delivery guy gets lost on the way, maybe something spills, everybody is going to blame the restaurant, not necessarily the delivery service, which is another big problem I didn't even consider when I was looking into this.   [0:04:52] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I didn't even think about that.   [0:04:54] Taylor Gibb: Definitely.   [0:04:54] PJ Bruno: Way less control.   [0:04:55] Taylor Gibb: Then even building the infrastructure to get all of the food, keeping it cold, keeping it ready to go at the door, did you guys see everything about that?   [0:05:04] Omari M.: Yeah, and I think when I read that I think immediately to one of my favorite restaurants, Xi'an Famous Foods.   [0:05:10] Taylor Gibb: Oh, love.   [0:05:11] Omari M.: Oh, if you've never had hand pulled noodles, it is amazing.   [0:05:16] PJ Bruno: That's the truth dude.   [0:05:18] Omari M.: But one of the things, and they have it all over the restaurant and if you know, you go to Xi'an Famous Foods, is you want to eat it within 15 minutes, because at that point the oil begins separating. So you're losing a lot of the experience when you're ordering and trying to order from certain restaurants, and you're losing what might be the optimal form that this food experience could've been.   [0:05:39] Taylor Gibb: Oh totally, and it's interesting to because we're aware of this, we know that foods often times best in the restaurant, but I saw this crazy statistic in the article, nearly 1/3rd of restaurants meals in the year ending in September were consumed at home, up from 2% in the previous year. So this is a massive jump, we all just got a lot lazier, things are getting a lot easier, and we all did it at the same time. So we're aware of this, we love the experience of going into a restaurant, but it seems like the trend is moving.   [0:06:07] PJ Bruno: Is that everywhere, or is that just New York City?   [0:06:09] Taylor Gibb: I think this one was in, I'd have to get back to you, it looks like just New York City, in this article here, which-   [0:06:16] PJ Bruno: Okay, okay, that makes sense.   [0:06:17] Taylor Gibb: We're super on demand here, if I can have my remote taken to me from a bike courier from across the room in a couple of years, I want it.   [0:06:25] PJ Bruno: I need that third party, that is just too far for me, and it's Saturday, I need to be waited on.   [0:06:29] Taylor Gibb: Well PJ, tell me though, as a consumer, are you a big fan of these on demand services, are you a Postmates man?   [0:06:35] PJ Bruno: Oh I'm a Seamless man through and through, honestly when I'm on the west coast, I go Postmates just because I think that's the way forward, yeah, I'm a big believer in having my food delivered to me and paying way too much for it, and I'm going to pay for that in the long run, and I understand that.   [0:06:50] Taylor Gibb: Oh totally.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: But man have I ever bought into the convenience of it.   [0:06:55] Omari M.: Wait, why do you pay more? I'm super interested because it's, you know it's cheaper in the restaurant.   [0:07:03] PJ Bruno: Right, okay, so I know it's cheaper in the restaurant, but I got home from a long day at work, and I don't know if you know this about me but I don't eat breakfast, so I haven't eaten breakfast, I eat lunch, but I only have a small window for lunch, and you know downstairs it's one portion and then get out of my face, and if I don't have enough time to go down around 2:00 pm to get my second lunch well then I'm pretty hungry. So the portion that I get-   [0:07:26] Taylor Gibb: Maybe they've never heard of second lunch Sam?   [0:07:27] Omari M.: Second lunch.   [0:07:28] PJ Bruno: 11:00 eez? Afternoon tea? For all you [Louder] fans out there.   [0:07:32] Taylor Gibb: Oh [inaudible].   [0:07:34] PJ Bruno: But yeah, no, I actually I consume ridiculous embarrassing large dinners sometimes, and I'm talking like a medium pepperoni pizza with a side of waffle fries, and two Pepsi's, that's embarrassing, but, so take that and then put the charge on top of it, honestly guys, sometimes I'm paying like $30 to $35 for a meal, it's terrible, it's disgusting, but once I've gotten home, and I sit on that couch, and I'm in that chill mode, it's you know what? I'm the king of the castle, I have some money to throw around, I could spend it on a trip to Bali, I could spend it on experiences or my friends, but you know what, my gullet is craving something special right now.   [0:08:11] Taylor Gibb: You know what your gullet might be craving too, in 10 years or so? Here's a segue for you, it could be an impossible burger, maybe you're going to be craving, you're going to say, I want that Pepperoni... Pepper...   [0:08:22] PJ Bruno: You got it, sound it out.   [0:08:27] Taylor Gibb: Cut that out because I want a pepperoni pizza, but I want that pepperoni to be FO pepperoni, maybe a little peppofoni pizza.   [0:08:36] PJ Bruno: Ooh, you got it patent pending.   [0:08:38] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, TM, everyone listening in.   [0:08:40] PJ Bruno: Taylor the creator, on her stuff.   [0:08:41] Taylor Gibb: That's right. We've got another article here that I picked out because I think it's super fascinating, we were talking earlier today about the impossible burger, which for those of you at home that might not be aware, is this I think a vegan burger, so all plant based, but it grills like meat, it sears like meat, it bleeds like meat, a little creepy, but I'm kinda in to it. A lot of people are saying that this is the way forward, not only for making a more cruelty free experience for eating, but for the good of the planet, because this doesn't mean that we're going to be taking up a ton of livestock, which produces CO2, our farming practices will be different. So first of all, I'm just really curious as to if either of you guys have tried any of these meats of the future?   [0:09:31] PJ Bruno: What about you Omari?   [0:09:31] Omari M.: Yeah, I buy it monthly.   [0:09:32] PJ Bruno: What?   [0:09:32] Omari M.: I buy the Beyond Meat, because there's a Whole Foods really close to me.   [0:09:37] PJ Bruno: Oh cool.   [0:09:38] Omari M.: So I hop in there and I get the beyond meat burger.   [0:09:40] PJ Bruno: And this is lab made meat that we're talking about.   [0:09:42] Omari M.: Yeah, we're talking lab, scientific coats.   [0:09:45] PJ Bruno: Not learning at Braze type stuff, this is actually-   [0:09:50] Taylor Gibb: Shameless plug. In a laboratory.   [0:09:50] Omari M.: Yeah dog, it's so good, it's really, really good. I was blown away the first time I had it because you pull it out, you take it out the box, and it very much feels like a hamburger patty, it looks like a hamburger patty, you slap it on the pan, you hear that sear that you always look for in a good burger.   [0:10:10] PJ Bruno: And it stays together? Because I feel like the concern when you come to veggie based patties, it crumbles, or it falls apart a little too easily, because it doesn't have the [sinues], right? Doesn't have the meat, but does that?   [0:10:19] Omari M.: Yeah, it holds together like a charm, and I've had my roommate eat a burger, and he was, "Honestly if you didn't tell me this was a Beyond Meat burger I would've thought it was a regular burger."   [0:10:32] Taylor Gibb: That is crazy, and they were in the article talking about the ways that they make this fake meat, and it's, they have a vat of what's called, we said, heme is how you pronounce it?   [0:10:41] PJ Bruno: Heme.   [0:10:41] Taylor Gibb: Why don't we have fake blood, just a big ole vat of fake blood, like an Edward Tolman-   [0:10:46] PJ Bruno: Is it that metallic?   [0:10:47] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and it's interesting too though because we were saying a lot of the reason that people are so reluctant to change the way that they are eating is because it's kind of cultural entrenched. I want to have my burger, and I want it to be the kind of burger that I want. But PJ you made a really good point earlier that this is effecting more than us.   [0:11:06] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it just is, I think especially America we're very much like, I have my freedoms, and I want to be able to have what I want, and I'm entitled to have a burger. But to me as soon as we're in a situation where animal agriculture is creating a bunch of CO2 and Methane, in whatever 10 or 20 years the environment is looking not so good. As soon as you're in a situation where your free will is affecting the future health of not just people on this planet, but future generations, that is when it's time to say, okay, maybe we need to rethink this for the good of all.   [0:11:41] Taylor Gibb: Totally.   [0:11:41] Omari M.: Word.   [0:11:42] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, I mean is your McDonald's burger really worth it? Who knows? I mean maybe in the moment at 3:00 am, you're like, screw future generations.   [0:11:50] PJ Bruno: Right, exactly, and you know that said, me being on my soapbox here, I eat meat, so it's not like, but it just is more like if we had this call to arms, kind of like everyone it's time, let's do it, I'd be the first one on there. But I mean as long as they're going to still have meat available, I'm probably going to eat that.   [0:12:07] Taylor Gibb: Ah, I love it.   [0:12:09] Omari M.: Dude, that's okay.   [0:12:09] Taylor Gibb: You know what? Omari's going to have [crosstalk]-   [0:12:11] PJ Bruno: It's impossible though dude, you-   [0:12:13] Omari M.: Yo, dog, you all are more than welcome, come through, I'll cook you all some impossible patties.   [0:12:16] Taylor Gibb: Let's have a cook out.   [0:12:17] PJ Bruno: You do that Sunday-   [0:12:18] Taylor Gibb: Let's have some Tofurky.   [0:12:19] PJ Bruno: Sunday dinner.   [0:12:19] Omari M.: Yeah dog.   [0:12:19] Taylor Gibb: Oh, amazing, we're getting to grilling season too here, Omari bring your apron, we're going to set up a meat free cook out.   [0:12:26] Omari M.: I'm with it.   [0:12:27] PJ Bruno: Oh actually, don't forget, also insect protein will become very big in our future.   [0:12:33] Omari M.: Ooh.   [0:12:33] Taylor Gibb: Ooh.   [0:12:33] PJ Bruno: I know, I know, Ooh, there's oohs like ooh, and then there's oohs like ew ooh, but you should know-   [0:12:39] Taylor Gibb: I can see it.   [0:12:39] Omari M.: Insects man.   [0:12:40] Taylor Gibb: Oh my god. Oh, I'm getting on a tangent but I've got to ask you guys, this is one of my favorite ice breakers. If you were given an unlimited budget and your only task was to make insects delicious, like the food of the future, what would you do? Because I'm always like nacho cheese powder, or like-   [0:12:56] Omari M.: Yeah, ground them up.   [0:12:57] Taylor Gibb: Grind them up.   [0:12:59] PJ Bruno: For me I just think salsa's, I bury things in ketchup because I like ketchup, sriracha would make that a next level.   [0:13:05] Omari M.: I think that there are whole, either Mexican or South American cultures where insect protein was the only source of protein during their time, during that civilizations time. So they've invented amazing ways to incorporate it, and it's persist because food is history, food is culture. So it's persisted over time and you see, I think there's a really great Chef's Table on it. On this guy who creates, I don't know exactly the dish he makes, but he sticks to using insects for it, because it's a culturally relevant dish, and it's so ingrained in who he is and where he's from.   [0:13:45] PJ Bruno: See that's the thing, it's like at the end of the day insect proteins, they're not going negatively affect the environment like animal agriculture does, but if you flip the script and you went to that guy, and were listen, insect proteins is messing stuff up, we need you to stop doing that, he's like no, that's part of who I am.   [0:14:00] Omari M.: Yeah.   [0:14:01] Taylor Gibb: So true.   [0:14:01] PJ Bruno: So it's culturally entrenched is the way to put it I guess.   [0:14:05] Taylor Gibb: Although I wonder how culturally entrenched all these things are, here's another segue for you. Talking a little bit about the power of culture, about I'm going to have my McDonald's burger whenever I want it, wherever I want it, and then a little bit of a swerve coming in from our buddies down at Burger King. So for those of you who haven't heard, this is a Burger King one cent Whopper detour, essentially this is a campaign that Burger King ran where if you ordered a Whopper within, I forget it was something like 300 feet of a McDonald's essentially right there, through their app, you would get it for one cent.   [0:14:38] PJ Bruno: That's right.   [0:14:39] Taylor Gibb: So that's I think brilliant marketing number one, but two opens the door to some really interesting different ideas for marketing, perhaps incredibly pervasive, and that's what this article is about. So we're talking in the future, you're sitting here, beep, bop, in my little robot car, and I'm like, "Robot car take me to Subway sandwiches," and it's, "All right Taylor," my robot car is very friendly about it, it's like, "But Taylor, but I need to tell you that Quiznos," which it's still around in the future, I'm not sure if it's around right now honestly, "Quiznos-   [0:15:12] PJ Bruno: It came back in the future.   [0:15:13] Taylor Gibb: If Quiznos has made a return and for now only you get one dollar Quiznos sandwich, "Taylor I can take you right there, right now, as your robot car." And I'm of course going to say, "Robot car take me to Quiznos, thank you." So all of that aside, let's think about marketing in the future. We've got self driving cars, we've got the idea of perhaps more Uber and Lyft where your Lyft driver could say, "There's a deal going on at CVS where we can get you some, it looks like you're feeling really sick after this night of drinking, do you need some Advil? I'll take you there, I have an ad."   [0:15:45] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:15:45] Taylor Gibb: Tell me a little bit about what you think about this kind of advertising of the future, doesn't necessarily have to food, but lets kind of talk about that.   [0:15:53] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it's interesting because they did mention in the article, it's funny because it starts with the whole trolling Whooper detour thing, but then it goes into like, imagine the future, you get a hankering for fast food, and your robo car pulls up, stuff like that, and basically goes through the whole scenario, but in the future where your car is a robot, and your car has screens all on the inside that advertises to you constantly. So first of all, on one side of the coin really interested in a dystopia future where I have advertising screens in my robo car feeding me images all the time, that's a little creepy.   [0:16:27] Omari M.: It's a Black Mirror episode.   [0:16:27] PJ Bruno: It is a Black Mirror-   [0:16:28] Taylor Gibb: I mean I always hit mute on those Taxi screens.   [0:16:30] PJ Bruno: Oh, every time, I turn it off, I don't even mute it.   [0:16:33] Omari M.: I just get out. This is not worth it.   [0:16:35] Taylor Gibb: See you.   [0:16:36] PJ Bruno: I rip the screen down, throw it out the window. But no, and then they go to talking about in the future they can have these eye tracking cameras and biometric sensors where it's paying attention to your body and what you want. So if you're tired it's like, "Oh, there's a Starbucks close by. Or you're feeling anxious because of your rapid eye movement, go get a massage, there's one down the street." So it's kind of this thing of I don't want to be sold stuff all the time, but if it's based on how I feel, and if it's picking up those, it's that personalization touch. So it kind, I can argue both sides of it.   [0:17:12] Omari M.: Dude, I never feel like people, I'm more like, I'll never feel like people get this right, because I'm a strong believer that once a marketing department, no offense to any marketing department, once a marketing department gets a hold of something, and they do it well, every other marketing department well we've got to do the same thing, and it goes way too far, and then all of a sudden consumers are now, everyone's doing this, this is incredibly invasive, it's who I am, and what I am, and where I am.   [0:17:39] Taylor Gibb: Totally.   [0:17:39] PJ Bruno: That's what they do, they push the envelope until they find where they've crossed that line.   [0:17:43] Omari M.: Exactly.   [0:17:43] PJ Bruno: Then they try to like... Reel it in, reel it in.   [0:17:45] Taylor Gibb: Sorry.   [0:17:45] Omari M.: And it's so hard to reel it in, yeah.   [0:17:47] Taylor Gibb: Apologetic tweets, and I got to tell you guys listening here on the line, Omari used to be part of our marketing department here at Braze.   [0:17:53] Omari M.: I love marketing.   [0:17:54] Taylor Gibb: He's since moved on to support, but I'm actually curious as your kind of marketers take here, talking about the strategy behind something like this. How can a brand maybe ride on the coattails of something let's say way in the future you've got this robo car, ride on these coattails but make it an experience that consumers are going to love, that they're going to want more of? What's the key to finding that line, finding that good balance? Tough question.   [0:18:17] Omari M.: That's a touch question, I feel like a lot of is just taking yourself out of one your shoes as a marketer, and then two the entire business, because I feel like it's really easy to step on toes when you're not cognizant of the toes you're stepping on.   [0:18:36] Taylor Gibb: Well put, well put.   [0:18:37] Omari M.: So you're able to, you're going to push out ideas and push forward marketing campaigns that can really get invasive for a lot of consumers. I mean there was a large point in time when I don't think anyone could really get post messages, right? Until we found the sweet spot.   [0:18:54] Taylor Gibb: The dark ages.   [0:18:55] Omari M.: Yeah, the dark ages, and now post messages are expected, and now consumers are able to turn off their post notifications, finally.   [0:19:04] Taylor Gibb: Sure.   [0:19:04] Omari M.: Where back in the day everyone was automatically opted in, and now they figured out look, maybe everybody doesn't want to be automatically updated, we should give them a choice. I think as long as marketers are aware that they are invading another person, or coming into another person's space with advertisements that might not be relevant to them at the time, as long as you're aware of that, your campaigns should naturally become something that's valuable to the consumer.   [0:19:31] Taylor Gibb: Nice.   [0:19:31] PJ Bruno: Well you know what's an interesting thought though is in the future, in your robo car, you're getting all these advertisements, and let's say all of them are hyper personalized, so there's not a single one that's not relevant, so it's every single, even if you don't want it, it's oh you realize that this is based on information about you, so it's relevant even if you don't want a massage at this moment, you realize that you're tired and it's picking up that you're tired. So every advertisement is personalized and relevant, and so then I think it becomes a matter of just exhaustion from people advertising to you. So to me, I think maybe the next tactic would be changing the format, or changing the medium, because you're in your robo car, there are seven screens all around your robo car, and you know you're going to get advertised to for the duration of the trip. So how do you change that and make it feel a little more like someone wants to take care of you, or someone wants to do something that you're interested in versus someone wants to make money off of you. It might be moving away from screens, because if you look at a TV in a car, you know you're being advertised too, and in the future in the robo car, that is almost synonymous, seeing a screen will just feel like marketing, it will feel like advertising, so in the future I hope, come on future, I'm rooting for you, we need to kind of surpass the screen, and do something that feels a little more... It's funny, what was it? It was, it might have been Black Mirror, but it was basically in the future the idea that your ad buddy, it's basically instead of receiving an advertisement, it's all right, I'll use ad... Oh, you know what it was? So basically, sorry, I'll explain, the ad buddy is basically it's a person, an actual person that sits next to you, and you're like, "Oh, I don't have enough money in my account to pay for my Metro card," like, "That's okay, do you want to use an ad buddy for the next seven hours and then that will pay for your Metro card?" It's like, "All right, fine." Boo, ad buddy, and then you just have this human that's next to you, a real human whose paid to just kind of read advertisements to you for the next seven hours.   [0:21:28] Omari M.: [inaudible] think of that.   [0:21:28] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it's more human, and it's a step backward, but it's-   [0:21:31] Taylor Gibb: It's off the charts on the humanity effects.   [0:21:34] Omari M.: Yeah right.   [0:21:35] PJ Bruno: Yeah, but this is a real person.   [0:21:36] Taylor Gibb: We are an actual human.   [0:21:36] PJ Bruno: Exactly, anyways, it was that show on Netflix with Emma Stone, and-   [0:21:43] Taylor Gibb: Oh, Jonah Hill.   [0:21:44] PJ Bruno: Jonah Hill, yes.   [0:21:45] Taylor Gibb: Oh, I don't remember what it's called.   [0:21:46] PJ Bruno: That's what it was.   [0:21:46] Taylor Gibb: But that is hilarious.   [0:21:48] Omari M.: Oh, oh my god it's on the top of my head.   [0:21:50] PJ Bruno: It's true, we're surrounded by computers and we're not going to look it up, we're going to, that's the question of the day, if you guys get back to us with the answer to that show, you win some sick swag.   [0:21:59] Taylor Gibb: Oh that's right.   [0:22:00] Omari M.: Yeah.   [0:22:01] Taylor Gibb: Swiggity swag.   [0:22:02] Omari M.: And a high five.   [0:22:03] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, even more I think valuable for Omari's...   [0:22:07] PJ Bruno: Any final thoughts about, I just love thinking about the future, I'm sorry, Back to the Future is my favorite movie of all time, so just considering.   [0:22:13] Taylor Gibb: Oh boy, that Mary McFly.   [0:22:15] PJ Bruno: The funniest thing about when you think about that stuff, people are like, oh in the future, flying cars, that was the biggest thing they could think of, it's dude, it's called a plane, it exists already, think of something better.   [0:22:27] Taylor Gibb: Do better.   [0:22:28] PJ Bruno: Do better.   [0:22:28] Taylor Gibb: I just love the Tomorrowland kind of version of the future too, it's like oh, and then everybody takes a pill instead of eating, and there's-   [0:22:34] PJ Bruno: Oh, that's what, see I forgot to get to that, the future of food, is it in pill form? Do we get it injected? Is there a chip that you have inside of your neck that releases proteins and...   [0:22:45] Taylor Gibb: I think we should have photosynthesis tattoos that take in the sunshine-   [0:22:50] Omari M.: Oh that would be tight.   [0:22:50] PJ Bruno: Whoa.   [0:22:50] Taylor Gibb: So need a little morning coffee or something, no way, go outside get your tattoo in the sunshine and it's bo do dup, and feeling it for the day, that's my idea for the future. Patent pending, we've got peppafony, and we got photosynthesis tattoos, anybody who wants to approach me with a deal, you on, I know you're listening, please just reach right out, all right?   [0:23:12] PJ Bruno: Awesome.   [0:23:13] Taylor Gibb: Well, Omari, did you have a final thought about the future of food, I saw it?   [0:23:17] Omari M.: Oh, no.   [0:23:18] Taylor Gibb: Oh, no, just wearing that apron, looking super fly. PJ, thank you so much for having us on the podcast today, I think it was a great time talking about tasty things and tomorrow.   [0:23:29] PJ Bruno: And what they could taste like tomorrow.   [0:23:31] Omari M.: Heck yeah.   [0:23:31] Taylor Gibb: That's right.   [0:23:32] PJ Bruno: And thank you guys for being here with us, this is PJ Bruno.   [0:23:35] Taylor Gibb: Taylor Gibb.   [0:23:36] Omari M.: Omari Matthew.   [0:23:37] PJ Bruno: You guys come back now, you hear? Take care. [0:23:39]

Lord of Growth, Spencer Burke, and SaaS Sales Mercenary, Patrick Forquer, talk Slack and Lyft heading for IPO while Gap is splitting into two independent public companies.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello there, welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and joined with me again, the lord of growth, Spencer Burke. How's it going?   [0:00:29] Spencer Burke: Hey, PJ.   [0:00:30] PJ Bruno: And also with me, from the sales org, the man who churns out more hot takes than hot cakes, Patrick Forquer.   [0:00:38] Patrick Forquer: Hey... Great to be with you Peter.   [0:00:40] PJ Bruno: It's good to have you guys back. This is a good episode too, we're talking all about IPO's, IPO readiness, who's getting themselves out there now, who plans to do it in the future. And then also, a nice little article about Gap splitting up later. But, before we jump in, level setting. Everyone's good? Patrick, you're feeling nice?   [0:01:00] Patrick Forquer: I'm just looking at your... Pineapple shirt.   [0:01:03] PJ Bruno: Mm-hmm (affirmative)   [0:01:04] Patrick Forquer: And... It's really inspirational.   [0:01:06] PJ Bruno: I think it's going to get us in the right zone.   [0:01:08] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, I'm ready for summer, it's the coldest day of the year.   [0:01:11] PJ Bruno: Yeah, sheesh.   [0:01:12] Patrick Forquer: Pretty depressing here in New York. I can't leave because my wife could have a birth at any moment, so I can only think about Florida. And I see your shirt and I'm transported to another world PJ, so thank you.   [0:01:23] PJ Bruno: Is the birth imminent?   [0:01:24] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, we're in the red zone, as they say.   [0:01:27] PJ Bruno: Oh, wow.   [0:01:28] Patrick Forquer: T-minus six days until the due date.   [0:01:31] PJ Bruno: Holy cannoli! [crosstalk]   [0:01:32] Spencer Burke: Wow!   [0:01:33] Patrick Forquer: So, to say I'm a ball of stress and emotion would be an understatement.   [0:01:39] PJ Bruno: It'd be a good day.   [0:01:40] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, it'd be great.   [0:01:42] PJ Bruno: Awesome.   [0:01:43] Patrick Forquer: Everyone pray for me, that's all I have to say.   [0:01:44] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:01:45] PJ Bruno: Everyone out there, please, pray for Patrick Forquer.   [0:01:47] Patrick Forquer: Yes, please. (laughs) And my wife.   [0:01:49] Spencer Burke: Obviously. (laughs)   [0:01:49] PJ Bruno: Obviously, and the child to be-   [0:01:51] Spencer Burke: That's a lot more stressful for you obviously. (laughs)   [0:01:55] PJ Bruno: All right, first article of the day, we got this seven billion dollar Slack has filed to go public. Slack, one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs of 2019 announced Monday that it had confidentially filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which sells an enterprise collaboration and chat platform, joins the ranks of Silicon Valley unicorns like Lyft, Uber, and Zoom, that could make history as the largest cohort of multi billion dollar privately funded companies to hit the public markets.   [0:02:28] Patrick Forquer: Wow.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:02:30] Patrick Forquer: Quick aside, when I was-   [0:02:32] PJ Bruno: Oh, good.   [0:02:33] Patrick Forquer: (laughs) About Slack. So, when I was interviewing at [inaudible], now Briz, I was also at the same time interviewing at Slack. And so I'm in this, one of their big glass conference rooms in their office down in Soho, and I'm interviewing with a woman on video chat. And like halfway in, kind of normal conversation going on, and then all of a sudden, apropos to nothing, she just kind of freezes up and gets super awkward. Starts stuttering, is like, "uh-" And then I turn around and Stewart Butterfield (laughs) standing outside the door, just waiting to come in. And then his PR woman came in and kicked me out of the room, mid-interview. So that was my-   [0:03:14] PJ Bruno: That's why you didn't get the job.   [0:03:15] Patrick Forquer: That was great.(laughs)   [0:03:16] PJ Bruno: That was when you met Stewart.   [0:03:18] Patrick Forquer: (laughs) Yeah, so Stewart and I are old friends-   [0:03:19] PJ Bruno: Old buds, from back in the day. [crosstalk]   [0:03:20] Patrick Forquer: Really happy for him. Spencer, what do you think of this story? I don't know, start us off.   [0:03:27] Spencer Burke: I mean, it's really exciting, we have a couple IPOs we're talking about in the cast today. Slack, I think, has become pretty iconic in the sense that it came out of nowhere, it feels like.   [0:03:40] PJ Bruno: Out of nowhere.   [0:03:41] Spencer Burke: And now, it's everywhere. In interviews, customers, Slack is all over the place. People want to connect with us over Slack more than they do over email. So I think it's exciting to see companies that you know IPO-ing on this kind of timeframe. Because, you know we're going to talk about Lyft, but like Airbnb, Uber, these companies that signify the unicorns in a lot of peoples' minds. We haven't really seen a lot of velocity towards IPO yet, so this really one of the first ones.   [0:04:16] PJ Bruno: Right, exactly. They're moving quick. They started working on the app at the end of 2012, they did their soft launch in August of 2013. And then they had, I read this article they did this crazy friends and family press blitz, and in the first day had 8,000 people using it. And then in two weeks, 15,000.   [0:04:36] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, also big shout-out to the U.S. Government for shutting down for a month, so all these IPOs that we're talking about we probably could've talked about a month sooner had the government been open but, you know...   [0:04:47] PJ Bruno: (laughs) Exactly, well hey, we're on their clock.   [0:04:49] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, one thing I find interesting too is as I read more about the Slack IPO was, they're doing a couple things differently. First they're a direct listing, so instead of doing a traditional IPO you're hiring an underwriter, who then likes to stint the stock pricing, and goes out to institutional investors for you. They basically, during direct listing to the exchange where their initial investors and employees who have stock can essentially create an exchange on their end, and then sell their stock individually, and to the upper market. The two benefits for the investors are there's not a lock-up period, you don't have to wait any specific amount of time. And it can be good and bad I guess, but since there's no defined price, the market sets the value, so it's super interesting. Which is why they're able to file confidentially, where they're not releasing the type of info that we'll talk about with Lyft. Where we see more detail on the growth [crosstalk] metrics et cetera. And what I was also looking at was interesting because they sell traditional subscription software at per seat pricing. And their per seat pricing and user base has gone up rapidly, as we've talked about, which is obviously a huge attribute to their success. They've made about 380 million in revenue last year, and somewhere I read that they have 900 million on the books, so, unlike Lyft they're not IPO-ing to raise money for the company, they're basically just IPO-ing so they can pay their initial investors back, they raised about a billion dollars. So completely different... State of business for most of the IPOs that we'll talk about for the rest of the podcast where its like they have a ton of money on hand, they're growing at a huge clip, they're relatively profitable for a company at their stage. And, you know, super interesting. I think they're the first to reck listing since Spotify, and I can't wait to see where the price falls, and how much shares go into the market from an availability perspective. So, be super interesting to watch, unlike traditional...   [0:06:53] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I was looking at some stats for IPOs generally, and one thing that was really interesting for me is most IPOs, it's like 40%, are in healthcare. I think we get really immersed in technology being in a tech space. Like, if its an IPO it has to be a tech company. In reality there's a much broader market that exists around IPOs and across industries. And actually, on the confidential filing, I think it's like 99% of companies do that, so that's the common trajectory for the process.   [0:07:29] Spencer Burke: That's interesting.   [0:07:32] Patrick Forquer: Also, I was reading about the general enterprise collaboration space. It's growing at a 15% year over year clip, which is awesome for Slack, and obviously they have a huge market share. But I was also reading about their competitors and I saw Yammer...   [0:07:46] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:07:46] Patrick Forquer: Would you like me to repeat that? [crosstalk]   [0:07:48] PJ Bruno: I haven't heard that word in so long.   [0:07:51] Patrick Forquer: Yes. Slack totally changed the game for this space, and everyone else is just trying to catch up. But, I was just thinking back to past softwares I used before I started using Slack, and it's just like, what a disaster.   [0:08:02] PJ Bruno: Didn't Yammer try to do like the same thing, wasn't it-   [0:08:05] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, just basically, horribly.   [0:08:07] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:08:07] PJ Bruno: Right, just bad. Just bad.   [0:08:07] Patrick Forquer: (laughs)   [0:08:08] PJ Bruno: Well you know they pride themselves, Stewart says, it's always like they're veracious when it comes to user feedback. They're just constantly taking it in, and mitigating risk. I guess it's like if they tried out with a group of engineers and one engineer says, "Oh, I don't like it, I'm not going to use it," that's like... It's kind of over for that opportunity. But yeah... Also as PR goes, I think he learned with Flicker, press and doing it the right way it's like, how you win the game. They were the official sponsor of the World Cup for Christ’s sake. No tech company does that.   [0:08:44] Spencer Burke: I didn't even know that, really?   [0:08:45] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah, if you watched any of the games Slack was everywhere, you know. So, they knew what they were doing with that. Let's move on. Lyft. Files for IPO. It [inaudible] it's growth and reveals it lost 991 million last year. Yeah, I mean, how do I feel about this? I'll give you guys just the opening tagline here: "Potential investors in Lyft Inc. Initial public offering got their first look at the ride-hailing companies financials Friday, revealing a startup that's hustling to outrun it's growing losses. Lyft's revenue is exploding, and so is its net loss. Like many IPO candidates, the San Francisco company has never turned a profit. It lost 991 million in 2018 up 32% from the year before, even as revenue from the same period doubled." And yeah, I don't think profitability really matters to IPO anymore. IPO should help that kind of, that relationship has changed quite a bit.   [0:09:49] Patrick Forquer: A couple of folks had thoughts on this, and tech industry just got Slack shown also. Shout-out to Boris and Chris for their [inaudible]. I read from recode, I'm reading the stats, so I hope it's true, but 80% of companies that have filed IPO in the past year have not been profitable the year leading up to their IPO. And the last time the percentage was that high was 2000... So not good times potentially, but if you see a company like Lyft... Most of the analysis of their IPO that I was reading people look at things like competitive advantage, product market fit, their margins, and then their growth metrics. So obviously growth is really good, so it comes down to your point of view on... They're going to raise money to pay off some losses that they have, or put towards R&D and investment, and expansion. But, do we really think that their product market fit or competitive advantage is that far superior to an Uber or any of the other ride sharing competitors? And I think that's kind of the key question. If you're going to invest in something like Lyft you're going to have to ask yourself-   [0:11:04] PJ Bruno: Do you use Lyft?   [0:11:05] Patrick Forquer: I do.   [0:11:06] PJ Bruno: You do-   [0:11:06] Patrick Forquer: Well, Lyft-   [0:11:06] PJ Bruno: Over Uber?   [0:11:07] Patrick Forquer: Braze costumer, obviously.   [0:11:09] PJ Bruno: Shout-out.   [0:11:10] Patrick Forquer: Shout-out. (laughs)   [0:11:11] PJ Bruno: Got to do it.   [0:11:12] Patrick Forquer: Great cross channel, customer engagement, Lyft.   [0:11:14] PJ Bruno: Love it.   [0:11:14] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:11:16] Patrick Forquer: But in all seriousness, yeah I use Lyft, it's a great product. When you talk to drivers, drivers who do both almost unanimously tell me that Lyft is better to their drivers, they pay them more, they treat them with more respect.   [0:11:30] PJ Bruno: Right, they get bonuses now.   [0:11:30] Patrick Forquer: They get bonuses and all that jazz. So that part I really like, it's just if the idea is that we're moving towards an autonomous future, where the cars drive themselves, then the real competitive situation you have to look at- it's not necessarily with Uber but its with car manufacturers like Tesla or GM, or whoever may be making these autonomous cars and then could have a more clear enough sight into unseating some like a Lyft or an Uber. And obviously that's not tomorrow, but in terms of long-long term growth, you know, something to watch.   [0:12:04] Spencer Burke: So are you... Thumbs up, thumbs down?   [0:12:08] Patrick Forquer: I'm thumbs up on Slack, I think I'm thumbs down on Lyft.   [0:12:12] Spencer Burke: Oh, why?   [0:12:14] Patrick Forquer: I don't know. It might have a couple of good quarters, I think if you're going to buy something and just set it and forget it, it's not something that I would want to hold for a really long time, just cause I don't think that the return for profitability or margin perspective is going to be where investors want it to be over the next three or four quarters. I mean... They lost a billion dollars last year.   [0:12:34] PJ Bruno: Patrick's picks.   [0:12:35] Patrick Forquer: Yeah. (laughs) [crosstalk]   [0:12:38] Spencer Burke: Not financial advice. (laughs)   [0:12:42] Patrick Forquer: What do you think PJ, you going to buy some Lyft?   [0:12:44] PJ Bruno: no. No, I'm definitely the type of guy that I'm ETF, index funds all the way. Just hang on to it until I die, like literally that's it.   [0:12:52] Spencer Burke: Keep it simple.   [0:12:53] PJ Bruno: My father taught me well.   [0:12:54] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:12:54] PJ Bruno: It's all about low risk, live forever.   [0:12:58] Patrick Forquer: Spencer, what do you think? Slack vs Lyft, which one would you buy?   [0:13:02] Spencer Burke: I think Lyft is more exciting to me. I think, for me Lyft's IPO represents an opportunity for people to buy into this vision of the world with ride sharing, [inaudible] one. They also talk about autonomous vehicles, so, that's all on the radar. Someones not going to sneak up on them and be like, “Oh, cars drive themselves now,” and Lyft's like, “Oh shit, we didn't see this one coming."   [0:13:30] Patrick Forquer: (laughs)   [0:13:30] Spencer Burke: And I think they wanted to file before Uber, just so that their owning this conversation. So even though they're to turning a profit right now, we know Ubers in the same position. And so they can kind of own that, be out there talking about it, control the messaging, and they're going to get a wave of investment from people who haven't had an opportunity to buy Uber and some of the private financing that they've done. Now Lyft's there in the public market, you want a piece of that action, it's there.   [0:13:59] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I still don't get how they're going to grow out of that hole though. Because last year, effectively they lost $1.50 for every ride that was given. [crosstalk]   [0:14:13] Patrick Forquer: Spencer doesn't care.   [0:14:15] PJ Bruno: (laughs) He was literally was going to say, whatever Patrick says, I'm going to take the opposing standpoint, and I'm going to [inaudible] him into the ground.   [0:14:23] Spencer Burke: Yeah, I don't know if it matters necessarily. We're stuck in this idea that they need to be profitable, right now. Amazon got a lot of criticism for a long time because they were investing so much [crosstalk] back into the company, and Ubers raised, through debt and venture capital, 24 billion dollars in financing in the private markets. So people are investing in these companies at an insane scale already. So the difference now is that the three of us, anyone, can go buy a piece of Lyft. People are already investing quite a bit here, it's now just in a public market. So means there's more scrutiny, they'll have to have a track tour profitability, but I think in a public market it gives you some pressure in a form to do that.   [0:15:17] PJ Bruno: Right, I agree. I also think, and I'm not saying that I'd never buy [inaudible] if it's a slam dunk vs Slack. But if you think about, okay we're going to prioritize growth over profitability, Amazons obviously the model for that. And they've done a great job and been a great investment for a lot of people. But also, Amazon's market share and their competitive advantage is pretty vastly superior to their competitors set, if you look at overall eCommerce sales Amazon is obviously very dominant in that way. And Lyft is as well. I mean, obviously it's them and Uber kind of neck and neck, but the question then becomes do you of their marketiture long term. And I don't have an answer, but its just something to think about, something I would think about.   [0:16:05] Spencer Burke: But I think even this kind of starts the Segway into our next topic a little bit. Even the way you're framing that kind of exposes that Amazon isn't just an eCommerce business. And they don't provide a lot of reporting to break everything out, but I think it's something like AWS is 50% of the revenue. And so it's like, all right, who is their eCom competitors? Okay, you can go through Walmart and other folks in that space, but then there's AWS, and who's their competitor? Google, Microsoft, and that's it. And maybe they should be two separate companies.   [0:16:38] PJ Bruno: Maybe it should be two separate companies, on that note...   [0:16:43] Spencer Burke: Great pivot.   [0:16:43] PJ Bruno: Yeah I know, what a Segway.   [0:16:45] Spencer Burke: You're a pro   [0:16:48] PJ Bruno: So Gap will split into two publicly traded companies, and their stock surges. Gap said Thursday that they'll split into two independently publicly traded companies, one comprised of it's Old Navy brand, ans the second a yet to be named company that includes its other brands like Banana Republic and Athletica. And yeah, The Gap stock surged like 23% on that call. Any initial thoughts about this?   [0:17:15] Patrick Forquer: I always like when you know something was a semi-hastily made decision, where it's like, we're splitting into two companies, it's going to be Gap and then company Y. (laughs) We haven't named the second company yet. We just know that this one company is doing really horribly and this other one is doing really well. We need to split them up so we don't cannibalize our business.   [0:17:36] Spencer Burke: I actually thought that was a great move, because then the press is about, it's about the change and their stock surged on the news-   [0:17:43] PJ Bruno: Interesting, right.   [0:17:44] Spencer Burke: Instead of criticism of, oh why did they call it some random acronym, or why is it Gap instead of Banana Republic? It's new-co, don't worry about the name, this is super exciting.   [0:17:56] PJ Bruno: New-co right.   [0:17:57] Patrick Forquer: New-co, doesn't matter.   [0:17:58] Spencer Burke: Exactly, yeah.   [0:18:02] PJ Bruno: And it's funny because I guess it's to protect old Navy's business, because they're doing quite well, and they want to keep themselves apart from some of these other brands. But Old Navy, I remember when I was a teenager it was quite cool place to shop, but I specifically called my cousins yesterday, my 15 and 17 year old cousins to be like, “Hey, do people go to Old Navy?” And they're like, “No!”   [0:18:24] Patrick Forquer: (laughs)   [0:18:25] PJ Bruno: “Okay, well where are you guys shopping?” They're talking about Urban Outfitters-   [0:18:27] Spencer Burke: I love that you're doing this research.   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: Yeah, Pacsun, Lululemon. I was like, “You can afford to shop at Lululemon?”   [0:18:33] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:18:33] PJ Bruno: What did they pay you in high school now! What's the salary in high school?   [0:18:38] Patrick Forquer: I was also bummed to see that their closing a bunch of Gap stores, because-   [0:18:41] Spencer Burke: Like 200.   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Yeah   [0:18:44] Patrick Forquer: Several times on business trips I have spilled a, you know, coffee or breakfast item onto a shirt that I'm wearing to a meeting and almost always The Gap is the nearest store that opens at 8:30- 9:00 am.   [0:18:59] Spencer Burke: You got to have a back up shirt.   [0:19:00] PJ Bruno: That's true. Except today, you currently have a stain on your shirt.   [0:19:03] Spencer Burke: Do I?   [0:19:04] PJ Bruno: (laughs)   [0:19:04] Patrick Forquer: I looked, dang it.   [0:19:08] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:19:08] Patrick Forquer: But no, The Gap clutch, the large slim fit blue Gap shirt. Can't miss.   [0:19:14] PJ Bruno: Yeah, that's true. Well you have a build like a large model, so I think that it probably fits you just right   [0:19:19] Patrick Forquer: (laughs)   [0:19:19] PJ Bruno: But you know, Old Navy, when they had those fleeces come out-   [0:19:22] Patrick Forquer: Oh, the performance fleece?   [0:19:23] PJ Bruno: They cornered the market, obviously.   [0:19:25] Patrick Forquer: (laughs) They sure did.   [0:19:25] Spencer Burke: Those commercials.   [0:19:27] PJ Bruno: That's all I remember, I was walking down the street, all I could remember was that whole advertising campaign around fleeces. I was like, God, they were in their stride then, and now I don't know if it's as accessible to the younger market.   [0:19:38] Spencer Burke: Yeah, the switch from a business Podcast to a nostalgia Podcast.   [0:19:41] PJ Bruno: You know what, I think the best Podcasts weave in both.   [0:19:45] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:19:45] Patrick Forquer: To Spencer's point, I think it'll be interesting to see if these other kind of retail conglomerates who have brands performing at different levels like Gap and Old Navy, will split off if [inaudible] comes to mind, as well as a couple of others. Abercrombie, Hollister, et cetera. Where certain brands, certain markets doing really well have really good margins, and then really good [inaudible], or really good eCommerce business. And so I think in that perspective we might see more of this as brands in retail continue to get more specialized. And obviously AWS should be a standalone company. And I think Kevin was talking about it, it would've been the fastest company to a billion in earnings in history if it had been its own thing.   [0:20:31] Spencer Burke: Yeah I think it's interesting splitting out the higher end brands from Old Navy. I was reading, apparently Diesel jeans is filing for bankruptcy, [crosstalk] (laughs) they totally missed the move to eCommerce, they took out all these leases on super expensive real estate on fifth avenue because they were trying to be a luxury brand, but the only stores that were performing were the ones that were the outlets, the discounted. So it's clear, people don't want to pay full price for these jeans, and if you look at that as two different businesses, ones really healthy, ones not so healthy. It's all rolled into one, and with some bad decisions on real estate, but I think that kind of highlights for why this is a move that's valued by the markets, right. They can understand the two different sides of this company in a more coherent way, rather than trying to lump it all together.   [0:21:31] PJ Bruno: Yeah, the way this is, it seemed like a more proactive move verses, “Oh we're drowning.” It felt a little more like, “Okay, we're going to take this...” I don't know, The Gap seems like a pretty smart company when it comes to some of the stuff they're doing, especially with personalization and whatnot. They have their, I don't know if you guys know but they have their own proprietary CDP that they use.   [0:21:56] Patrick Forquer: I think that the worse thing that happened to The Gap was... What's that movie with Steve Carell where he's the dad on the rebound, and then Ryan Gosling says to him, “You can do better than The Gap.” And I think I saw that while wearing a Gap shirt, and I felt really bad [crosstalk] about myself.   [0:22:10] PJ Bruno: Oh, it's like crazy about love or something like that. Crazy in love, or something.   [0:22:15] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, well... You can't do better than The Gap. I think Spencer's wearing Gap right now if I'm looking [inaudible].   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: Is this Gap?   [0:22:21] Spencer Burke: I'm not, I don't do brand endorsements.   [0:22:23] PJ Bruno: Who are you wearing? Who are you wearing?   [0:22:26] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:22:26] PJ Bruno: Tell us! Tell us!   [0:22:27] Spencer Burke: We don't have a Patreon, but you can send a large slim fit to-   [0:22:31] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, MeUndies, if you're listening... We need a sponsor.   [0:22:37] Spencer Burke: Actually Pat, as our historian and financial analyst I have a question for you.   [0:22:42] Patrick Forquer: Yes.   [0:22:42] Spencer Burke: In the article it says the current market cap for Gap is 9.7 billion.   [0:22:48] Patrick Forquer: Mm-hmm (affirmative)   [0:22:48] Spencer Burke: Slack could be valued at seven billion in their IPO, how do you... I think for a lot of people Gap, know them, I can see their stores, wearing their clothing, almost ten billion dollar company, sure. Slack, it's a chat app. It's almost worth the same valuation. How do you explain that to people?   [0:23:12] Patrick Forquer: I don't know what you're talking about.   [0:23:14] PJ Bruno: (laughs)   [0:23:14] Patrick Forquer: Well I mean Gap also has a very large international brand and presence, so its not just like a domestic U.S. Brand. But, I don't think you do, and especially if you look at the seven billion, I don't know what the multiplier, I think it was like 25x to earnings.   [0:23:31] PJ Bruno: Mm-hmm (affirmative)   [0:23:32] Patrick Forquer: So, I mean, we talk a lot about that here at Braze in terms of having SAS based revenue model, investors tend to like subscription based business more than they like retail business, because retail is subjects to market fluctuation and seasonal, overhead, seasonal impacts, macroeconomic impacts. You know, if Slacks an essential part of your business and the market goes down, you're still going to use it because it's how you run you're business. But I might not go buy a Gap shirt if-   [0:24:06] Spencer Burke: (laughs) I don't know, you're doing it to do business, right?   [0:24:08] PJ Bruno: So you're saying Slack is recession proof? You know that you will have to work until the day you die-   [0:24:11] Patrick Forquer: Well no, nothing-   [0:24:12] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:24:12] PJ Bruno: And that is certain.   [0:24:15] Patrick Forquer: Well when Social Security- [crosstalk]   [0:24:17] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:24:18] Patrick Forquer: When Social Security evaporates in the next 20 years we are going to all be working until we're 90 anyway.   [0:24:23] Spencer Burke: I feel like we have gone off the rails-   [0:24:26] PJ Bruno: (laughs) I think that's part of it. Well anyways, just in time for us to wrap up. Any final parting words-   [0:24:33] Spencer Burke: Kill switch.   [0:24:33] PJ Bruno: On IPO readiness?   [0:24:35] Patrick Forquer: I just can't wait for Bird's IPO, that's all I have to say.   [0:24:38] PJ Bruno: That's your jam.   [0:24:40] Patrick Forquer: Yeah, that's my jam.   [0:24:41] Spencer Burke: (laughs)   [0:24:41] PJ Bruno: So many [crosstalk] plugs today.   [0:24:42] Patrick Forquer: Shout-out to Cordy Thorten if you're listening.   [0:24:46] PJ Bruno: Spence, you want to leave the people with something good? Something great?   [0:24:49] Spencer Burke: No, I'm done.   [0:24:51] PJ Bruno: All right, well you know what, I think I'm done too. But you guys, stay sharp, keep your eyes open, eyes on the prize, and come back and see us next time.

Email Product Manager Gurbir Singh and the Deliverability Godfather himself Andrew Barrett sit down to talk ISPs (Internet Service Providers), ESPs (Email Service Providers, and how they factor in to your emails making their way into the inbox.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hi there, this is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze for Impact. I'm very, very excited to have with me today, two of my very good friends, special guests. One, Gurbir Singh, who's a product manager here at Braze, and he owns email. Hello, Gurbir.   [0:00:33] Gurbir Singh: Hey, PJ. How's it going?   [0:00:34] PJ Bruno: Pretty good, man. Also with us, Andrew Barrett, our director of email deliverability in the house. How's it going, buddy?   [0:00:41] Andrew Barrett: It's going well. It's going great. I'm so happy to be here in the same room with you guys for a change.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: I know. Andrew's usually in D.C. Doing the remote thing, but we see them all the time on Slack, the deliverability dojo. He is the Sensei. He's there answering all the questions. Today, I wanted to get these two email champs in the room. Just talk a little bit about deliverability, but also more specifically ISPs and ESPs. What are they? What are they responsible for? Let's pretend I know nothing except a small amount of information. Right now, that is, correct me if I'm wrong, ISPs, they provide the internet, they can leverage spam filters and blacklists to protect people from unwanted mail. Examples, I guess would be Comcast, AT&T, Verizon. Is that accurate so far?   [0:01:33] Andrew Barrett: Absolutely.   [0:01:33] PJ Bruno: Okay. Jump in and stop me as soon as it's inaccurate information.   [0:01:38] Andrew Barrett: No. Everything you said right there is absolutely true, but you take it one step higher. What they really are are businesses. They're businesses that are in the game to make money. Same as anybody who's actually sending mail to users of the inboxes that they provide. One of the big questions out there in deliverability land is, how do you make money off of an inbox that you're not charging anybody to use? Right? It turns out that everything we say about delivering email has everything to do with, not just the business model that we're in as marketers and senators, but also what's the ISP's business model here? Once you understand how the ISPs are making their money, all kinds of light bulbs start going off in your head around deliverability. What you find is that when you align your email sending program to the ISP's revenue requirements, what their business model is, all of a sudden, bang, deliverability happens.   [0:02:39] PJ Bruno: It's magic.   [0:02:41] Andrew Barrett: It is magic. You can't avoid it. It is an inevitable outcome of aligning your business model with the ISP. The great news is, is that everybody wants the same thing. Right?   [0:02:53] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:02:53] Andrew Barrett: Email recipients want email that they love to read. ISPs want to be able to put that content in front of their users of the free inboxes. That's because the more often those recipients can engage with the email, the more and better opportunities the ISPs have on making money, because their customer is not the inbox user, their customer is the advertiser that's putting contextually relevant advertising alongside the email that we're sending. If we're sending mail that users want to read, the recipients are happy, the ISPs are happy, we're happy, everybody's happy.   [0:03:37] PJ Bruno: I mean, and that's the dream state is making everything happy. But I guess does it mean that traditionally, ISPs look out for the email receiver, while ESPs prioritize the email sender? Is that, not at all?   [0:03:53] Gurbir Singh: No, I mean I think ISPs definitely do look out for the users, but as Andrew said, they definitely look out for their own business model as well. Then, ESPs are really focused on working with the brands. Right? These guys are the delivery agents. They're the ones sending out massive amounts of emails on behalf of various brands around the world. Their goal is to say, I want to get you in an inbox. I want to make sure you're successful. It's kind of hand in hand a little bit. The circle of life is really, if you make the ISPs money, you're going to be good.   [0:04:27] Andrew Barrett: That's right. I mean, anytime our business model is in conflict with the ISP's business model, we lose. All right?   [0:04:34] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:04:36] Andrew Barrett: It's important to understand that the users of those free inboxes are not the ISP's customers. Right? The users of the inbox are the inventory, and it's an inventory with a super short shelf life. The ISPs, their job is to create a pleasant and curated email experience for the users for their inventory, so that they'll last long enough to show them some advertising.   [0:05:04] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:05:06] Gurbir Singh: That's a good point.   [0:05:06] Andrew Barrett: If you can just keep that in mind, that relationship between those three parties in this little love triangle that is email-   [0:05:15] PJ Bruno: Email is a love triangle. Don't kid yourself.   [0:05:17] Andrew Barrett: That's right. It's very tightly interwoven.   [0:05:21] PJ Bruno: Okay. Let's take a step back. In the beginning, ISPs showed up materializing out of basically nothing. Right?   [0:05:31] Gurbir Singh: Well, I mean a lot of the original ISPs were just the people who provided the internet. Right? Like AOL. They allowed you to connect to the internet, and then they were like, look, there's this thing called email and you can get it. We'll provide you an inbox where you can receive all your email. Same with Yahoo.   [0:05:48] PJ Bruno: At some point along the way, there were abusers. Is that right? Because this has got to be kind of, I'm talking about-   [0:05:56] Gurbir Singh: Anywhere there's volume, there's to be people looking to game the system. Right? There's going to be abusers, there's going to be people who are going to say, "Click here and get 10 free and ringtones," and you know that takes you somewhere else where you don't actually think you're supposed to be going. There's always going to be people gaming the system, and the ISPs, that does not jive with their business models, so they created a spam folder, and they put these guys in the spam folder, and they got really sophisticated at tracking who is a spammer, who's not. That distinction is really where ESPs, I think, really help along with keeping marketers honest and saying, look, if you put this subject line in, that's spammy, don't do that. Here's some best practices. Here's how you should create your content. Here are the people you should target. Things like that.   [0:06:44] PJ Bruno: Right. It doesn't stop at best practices. Right? We got here, the Gmail Promo Tab, which launched I guess, 2013, when Gmail announced the creation of different inbox tabs, including the promotions tab. Now, initially, it was said that Gmail is killing email marketing. Was this the notion that was kind of felt across the board by marketers that this was a tough pill to swallow?   [0:07:08] Andrew Barrett: Well, marketers definitely felt that way. In fact, we saw a lot of ... A couple of guys I remember back at that time were proposing a class action suit against Gmail, forgetting for the moment that Gmail, at the same time was also providing them for use of this infrastructure that they could use to reach their intended recipients. Nevermind that. Right? They're putting us in the fake inbox. I can understand the frustration. It's hard to have something taken away that you had for so long. But the other side of the coin is that way of thinking that, oh, you're putting me in the promotion set. I think that's wrong thinking on behalf of marketers. I think that that assumes a model of advertising that is more interruptive. Right? Like TV and radio, which is very linear. You're watching your story, and wait a second, wouldn't you like to buy some soap? No? Okay, well let's get on with the story then, and so on like that. Right? Email and other digital channels are not linear. Right? I think that marketers are best served when they can get their message in front of the recipients when they are their most receptive to it, and they are most receptive to marketing messages, not when they're reading email from grandma in upper Poughkeepsie. If you interrupt that, right, you're way more likely to get exactly the wrong kind of attention from the recipient in the form of a spam complaint. On the other hand, if you're enjoying strong placement in the promotions tab, people will turn to that tab when they are ready to see the promotions. I'm not a regular guy because I like email, but I like to see what winds up in there, mostly because I'm curious about the content and-   [0:09:12] Gurbir Singh: Right. It's research for you at that point.   [0:09:14] Andrew Barrett: But I do a lot of buying out of that promotions tab.   [0:09:18] PJ Bruno: The most relevant things are pushed to the top of the promotions tab. That's pretty much how it works. Right?   [0:09:24] Andrew Barrett: It can be, especially with some of this newer stuff that Gmail is rolling out, especially on the mobile side.   [0:09:30] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. It's like the new Gmail promotion tab does that. It groups up your messages based on industries, based on relevant, for when the offer is expiring, things like that. There's a number of variables that Gmail has introduced, but the traditional promotion tab was just if you got there and it's at the top of your inbox, it's there. Right? I think that's what was frustrating for marketers is that they spent all this time learning to get into the primary tab and now they're being asked to say, by the way, we redid the promotions tab and we give you all these new levers to pull and play with. Now, go back into the promotions tab, and people are rightfully so, kind of upset because it's just being thrown at them.   [0:10:10] Andrew Barrett: Well, they're are only upset if they don't remember what marketing was like before.   [0:10:14] Gurbir Singh: Yeah.   [0:10:15] Andrew Barrett: Right? They have this beautiful one-to-one direct channel to ostensibly engaged recipients that never existed before in the history of the planet, and nobody writes a check to Gmail to send email to Gmail's users. It's a gift horse. To get angry about that seems a little disingenuous to me.   [0:10:36] PJ Bruno: It feels very human.   [0:10:37] Andrew Barrett: Well, okay fine. They're human beings.   [0:10:42] PJ Bruno: You get something you want and then you get it taken away, you get pissed off. But no, I mean, they've been optimizing that promotions tab. Right? It's card based. It's like, you know what? We know you want to be in the inbox, but let's create something great in the promotions box that actually optimizes for what you're trying to do.   [0:10:59] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. I think it's a really good push by Gmail. One, they're going to collect way more data around what the message really is. Two, they're going to collect, are people actually interested in these offers, or are we going to push people down? You can see the business opportunities there for Gmail to say, similar to ad, you can pay to be at the top or you can pay to be at the top of your own industry bundle. If I'm Nike and Adidas, I could theoretically page email and say, "Put me always above Adidas." Right?   [0:11:31] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:11:32] Gurbir Singh: I don't know if they're actually thinking things like that, but I just see a bunch of different opportunities that they kind of opened, that other ISPs don't even have the luxury to even think about right now.   [0:11:43] Andrew Barrett: Yeah, they could do that, but I think they have a longer game in mind. Right? If they do something that appears to inhibit, in any way, the user's engagement with the inbox in its totality, I think they're not doing themselves any favors. What I think that we'll continue to see, and I'm guessing here, too, is that the kinds of changes we'll see in the promotions tab are those that award senders who are doing a better job at sending content that appears to be more engaging to a preponderance of recipients. That is awarded a better placement in the inbox.   [0:12:25] Gurbir Singh: That's true. I think they also, or actually the first ESP in my opinion that's actually adopted a mobile phone. This update to the promotion tab is directly for people who use the Gmail application. Right? They've acknowledged desktops are going out of time and we are getting switched to a mobile only world, and they're one of the first that are actually adopting. It's like this card that's coming out, it's a static image, but future iterations allow you to scroll and tell different cards and have different images and different links.   [0:12:58] PJ Bruno: Right. That's what AMP is, right?   [0:13:00] Gurbir Singh: No. AMP is completely something that's just interactive email.   [0:13:04] PJ Bruno: But within the email you can actually kind of scroll and click in and see different.   [0:13:08] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. It's like having a website right in your inbox so you don't have to leave, which is another pain point I think for marketers because the behavior is always been, I want to drive traffic to my website, and now all of a sudden, when this thing comes out, it's still in beta, but when it does come out, you're basically telling your customers you're living within the Google ecosystem. Right? You're browsing within the Google ecosystem, they're going to do some actions. You have no insight, no way of knowing what they're doing outside of the parameters you provided them. That's it. You can't dynamically change the workflow on your website as you typically do. This is a bigger change than people think it is, in my opinion.   [0:13:56] PJ Bruno: Gurbir, you're a big part of what we do here with our email at Braze. Obviously, you helped push our content blocks live, email preference center, all this stuff, optimizing the crafting and sending of emails, a big part of what you do. How do you overcome that resistance to change? Do you guys give a lot of thought to that when you're like-   [0:14:16] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. First of all, I mean, I work with a really talented engineering and design team that kind of put all these things together.   [0:14:22] PJ Bruno: Shout out.   [0:14:23] Gurbir Singh: Yeah, shout out. I might be at the face of it when it comes down to external, but there are some true heroes back there. But yeah, I mean, we do a lot of research when we're looking into new features. The content blocks is a great example, right? Content blocks, typically known as the email only feature, with other industries. When we looked at it we said, well, wouldn't it be cool if you could use it in Push, if you can use it on web? The same exact offer being tied to a user across every channel you want. You can have that consistency easily as a marketer, without having to replicate and create these over and over again. That operational cost is what we looked at a lot. Right? The cost of a marketer sending up four separate messages, setting up four different channels, and then ensuring, is the QA right on all four of them? Testing that and then sending it out. Right? If we can reduce the time for you to create all of that, those are the things we look at.   [0:15:24] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:15:25] Gurbir Singh: But yeah.   [0:15:29] PJ Bruno: Andrew?   [0:15:30] Andrew Barrett: Gurbir is the expert there. Every day, I will defer to his expertise there. I like to keep my head down in the inbox. That's where I'm most comfortable.   [0:15:40] PJ Bruno: That's where he belongs.   [0:15:41] Andrew Barrett: Right.   [0:15:42] PJ Bruno: That's good. I'm trying to get all these things straight in my head. Do we see, traditionally, ISPs, they do want to protect the receivers of mail, right? I mean, obviously they want to protect their bottom line, but will be under the guise of this?   [0:16:00] Andrew Barrett: Well, no, I mean it aligns very well at times perfectly with their own business model because if they're putting their own customers at risk to third parties, they're not going to keep coming back to their inboxes just to get shot at again.   [0:16:14] PJ Bruno: Gotcha.   [0:16:14] Andrew Barrett: They want to keep them around. Keeping bad things, malware, spam, other types of things, out of that inbox, speaks directly to the longevity of their business model and the longevity of their inventory, the users.   [0:16:33] PJ Bruno: Launched back last year, in 2018, you guys know about this, the BIMI. I don't know if they call it BIMI, or if it's just brand indicators for message identification? For those of you who don't know, it's a standardized way for brands to publish their brand logo online and lets logos be easily incorporated into messaging and social media applications. It does this with built in protections, which is building off of D-Mark.   [0:16:58] Andrew Barrett: Right.   [0:17:00] PJ Bruno: I mean, I guess we could say at this point D-Mark is starting to catch on more and people are using it more.   [0:17:06] Andrew Barrett: Absolutely. Gmail has been kind of a kingmaker in that regard. I mean, if you ask Gmail, they would prefer that everybody use D-Mark for everything all time, which is fine. For the longest time, it was really a tool for high value targets like financial institutions, insurers, banks, things like that to keep bad guys from trying to spoof their brand in order to capture login credentials and things of that nature. D-Mark, at its roots though is an authentication protocol, or a platform standing, a reporting mechanism that stands on top of authentication. The timing is really kind of interesting because Google Plus business pages are going away. Right? That whole Google Plus social media experiment is going to get killed off here in a couple of weeks. That was how you got your logo or your picture in the inbox next to your subject line was through validating a business page and [crosstalk 00:18:25].   [0:18:25] PJ Bruno: That was the only way to get it in there?   [0:18:27] Gurbir Singh: Well, you could do it through their promotions tab now, too. You can just pass in a logo and it works. That's why I don't get why?   [0:18:34] Andrew Barrett: Well, yeah, but I don't think they would pick up that logo unless they had some kind of assurance that you were using that logo, that you were an authorized user of that logo, which means-   [0:18:47] Gurbir Singh: You can just pass in any logo when you use the promotions tab. We've tested. I can pass on anything, which is why I find it really funny where-   [0:18:54] PJ Bruno: That's crazy. That's nuts.   [0:18:54] Gurbir Singh: Right, but it's Google, right? Look how big Google is, how many teams did they have? Clearly somebody's not talking to somebody.   [0:19:04] Andrew Barrett: Well, I think BIMI will replace that functionality.   [0:19:08] Gurbir Singh: Probably.   [0:19:08] Andrew Barrett: You've got this authentication standard backing up the presentation of this logo, and suddenly you don't have to rely on Google Plus anymore, and align in the header of your html to prove that you actually own the domain, so that the logo or the picture can turn up in the subject line. It comes at a good time and it helps to enhance this message around adoption of D-Mark.   [0:19:33] PJ Bruno: You said Google is really a big advocate of D-Mark. Do they have a vested interest in D-Mark?   [0:19:41] Andrew Barrett: I don't think that they do. I'm not sure why they're so hot and bothered over D-Mark above and beyond the other authentication protocols, SPF and DKIM, which are sort of prerequisites for D-Mark. D-Mark is just the reporting thing. The question I think that's on a lot of people's minds these days that pay attention to this kind of stuff is, does a more restrictive D-Mark policy get you better inbox? I mean, you can publish a D-Mark policy that says, if it fails, don't do anything. Right? Or you can have a D-Mark policy that says if it fails DKIM, reject it, or quarantine it, or do something with it. Do you get more inbox if you say, if it fails? Yeah, don't do anything.   [0:20:30] PJ Bruno: Or if it passes, is there some sort of reporting? If it passes and D-Mark is present, then you could have some sort of reward?   [0:20:37] Andrew Barrett: Maybe.   [0:20:38] Gurbir Singh: Like positive effect, like a scoring system, goes up or down?   [0:20:42] Andrew Barrett: Do not know. Don't know.   [0:20:44] Gurbir Singh: Black box.   [0:20:46] Andrew Barrett: I think it's still working itself out. I'm not at all sure why Gmail is championing D-Mark.   [0:20:53] PJ Bruno: I mean, this thing, the BIMI thing, it was created by [Authenticators] Working Group, which was led by cybersecurity firm, Agari, and then also representatives from Comcast. Failmail, right? Microsoft.   [0:21:07] Andrew Barrett: Well, Agari is in the D-Mark reporting business. Right? So that's their vested interest in participating, but I don't know what Gmail's is other than having a handy replacement for the death of Google Plus.   [0:21:24] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. I mean, I could see if you can be a better inbox provider and essentially wipe out spam, which is the majority of volume that these guys ever see. Right? It's like 90% plus or something. That's a lot of storage costs. Right? ISPs have to keep every email around. They just do. Right? You can scroll back years and years of your Gmail inbox and you'll see, you can still find it, you can still click it. That's sitting somewhere. They're paying for that cost. If they can wipe away 90% of that somehow with a better authentication system, that's a lot of money for somebody. I can see that being a really big beneficial ad for them.   [0:22:05] Andrew Barrett: I agree with you to an extent. There's a lot of spammers out there who are signing their stuff with a DKIM and SPF and that are publishing a D-Mark record.   [0:22:14] Gurbir Singh: Well, I'm assuming with BIMI, it's another level, essentially. That's why they're working towards that one, and hopefully that one solves it. Like anything, there's always-   [0:22:24] PJ Bruno: There's always counterfeiters out there, man.   [0:22:26] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. Someone's going to break it.   [0:22:28] PJ Bruno: Catch me if you can. Moving on, what's the future, what are the big things on the horizon that email senders should be looking for, as far as feature specific, as far as, I mean, legislation affecting anything?   [0:22:48] Andrew Barrett: Well, I think we can call the legislation one absolutely dead and cold now. The Federal Trade Commission recently completed a two year review of the 16 year old CAN-SPAM federal law and decided it was all good, man. They spent two years looking at that sucker and decided, wow, it just can't get any better than how it is, which is really, really frustrating. I was at the Federal Trade Commission in the spring of 2003 for two days of testimony from a bunch of different groups, and there was five different versions of anti-spam language. It's five different competing versions pending in the lower house in Congress. They were trying to merge all those disparate versions of the language together in what would eventually become CAN-SPAM, and they were taking all this input from nonprofit anti-spam, watchdog groups, senders. They actually had a couple of spammers on the stage talking about why they do what they do, and that sort of thing.   [0:24:02] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:24:02] Andrew Barrett: It was all in. Everybody scrubbed in on this thing. What came out in 2003 act, which was largely the [Burns Widen Act 00:24:14] was terrible. I mean, not only did it fail utterly to advance a definition of spam, which I don't blame them for because that is problematic on its face for a whole bunch of reasons, but where they really fell down is that they failed to advance a meaningful definition of email. Right?   [0:24:37] Gurbir Singh: They left it as a digital communications?   [0:24:39] Andrew Barrett: For the purposes of this statute, email means "an electronic message," period. Full stop.   [0:24:48] PJ Bruno: Great.   [0:24:49] Andrew Barrett: What? Really, really bad. Ideally, the definitive quality of email would have been transit via SMTP.   [0:25:02] Gurbir Singh: Right.   [0:25:02] Andrew Barrett: That's what was needed there. You can never look to lawmakers to predict the future. It's not the law we wanted, but it was probably the law we deserved. It was just that, and so I was really astounded when they decided that they weren't going to make any changes.   [0:25:22] Gurbir Singh: Didn't California, or aren't they evaluating their own special law just for the state of California?   [0:25:29] PJ Bruno: Leave it to California.   [0:25:30] Andrew Barrett: Yeah. Well, they had one before 2003. California is great at passing really restrictive laws, only to have them be superseded by federal legislation months and years later. The California anti-spam law was very restrictive and it was in place for only a couple of months before the federal law came in and eviscerated it, superseded it.   [0:25:55] PJ Bruno: All right, guys, we're at about time. Before we close up shop, any last words of advice to email sender's, email receivers? It can be simple to something you want to go out on. What's the big takeaway?   [0:26:11] Andrew Barrett: Just remember that business relationship between those three parties, and if you can keep that in mind, that relationship will inform every decision you ever have to make as a sender. If I had to define deliverability in one sentence, it would be, how not to look like a spammer. That's it. But there's a whole lot underneath that that can keep folks talking for days, and hours, and careers.   [0:26:36] PJ Bruno: And podcasts.   [0:26:37] Andrew Barrett: And podcasts.   [0:26:38] Gurbir Singh: Andrew's going to write a book.   [0:26:39] Andrew Barrett: And career long podcasts.   [0:26:40] PJ Bruno: I have to make this a whole series. Gurbir, you got some final thoughts?   [0:26:44] Gurbir Singh: I mean, I circled back to Andrew. It is a business. Understanding the motivations of each of these guys will help you, and make you successful.   [0:26:56] PJ Bruno: Absolutely. I'll say to spammers out there, if you're looking for alternative forms of revenue, check out the speaker circuit, because apparently, they'll be willing to have you on stage. Thank you guys so much for coming to hang out with us. This is PJ Bruno, Gurbir Singh, and Andrew Barrett. You guys take care. [0:27:14]

In the wake of Davos 2019, the World Economic Forum, tensions are running high. Large companies are being scrutinized for reaping huge tax breaks while not giving back to the community. CEOs are trying to balance a board's expectation of making fiscally responsible decisions and also maintaining a culture of trust and creativity. Should tech entrepreneurs be tasked with fixing the world? Is it their responsibility?        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: What's up guys? Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me today two very close buddies. Across from me is Boris Revechkis, product manager here at Braze, and also I believe descendant of Rasputin? Is that-   [0:00:34] Boris Revechkis: That's accurate, yes. What's up everybody?   [0:00:36] PJ Bruno: Cool. Here he is. And to my right, your left, we have also a good friend of mine, Ryan Doyle, who's recently become an AE here at Braze. He is the legitimate country boy turned bonafide city boy. How you doing here Ryan?   [0:00:50] Ryan Doyle: How y'all doing? Yeah, no. Only recently, seven months now.   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:00:54] Ryan Doyle: Yes.   [0:00:54] PJ Bruno: What a turn.   [0:00:55] Boris Revechkis: Doyle Farms.   [0:00:57] Ryan Doyle: Doyle and Son Farms.   [0:00:58] Boris Revechkis: Doyle and Son Farms.   [0:00:58] Ryan Doyle: Remember where you came from.   [0:00:59] PJ Bruno: That's right.   [0:00:59] Boris Revechkis: Love it.   [0:01:00] PJ Bruno: How you guys doing? I know, Boris you're fighting a cold-   [0:01:03] Boris Revechkis: I'm getting some cold.   [0:01:03] PJ Bruno: And somehow you made it here today, I love that.   [0:01:05] Boris Revechkis: I'm hanging in there, doing it for the podcast.   [0:01:09] PJ Bruno: God, that's the commitment we need to see more of, kind of across the board.   [0:01:12] Boris Revechkis: I may faint. I may faint during the podcast, but if I do, just go on without me.   [0:01:16] Ryan Doyle: We'll keep going yeah.   [0:01:17] PJ Bruno: Yeah, we'll edit it out. We'll edit out your faint-   [0:01:19] Boris Revechkis: Perfect.   [0:01:19] Ryan Doyle: I can do your voice.   [0:01:21] PJ Bruno: Ryan, how you doing buddy?   [0:01:22] Ryan Doyle: I'm doing fantastic. Just meetings, meetings, meetings, deals, deals, deals.   [0:01:26] PJ Bruno: Cool.   [0:01:26] Ryan Doyle: They really crack that whip.   [0:01:27] PJ Bruno: They do, don't they?   [0:01:28] Ryan Doyle: Yes.   [0:01:30] PJ Bruno: You told me yesterday you had a cool little prospecting adventure and a weird experience.   [0:01:35] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, you want me to talk-   [0:01:36] PJ Bruno: Can you share? Yeah, yeah. Give a little splattering of it.   [0:01:39] Ryan Doyle: So, just the background on it was, I had a prospect who came to Braze because they were launching an app. That app had to do with paying with your face. It's a facial recognition technology. They wanted to put in coffee shops, so when you walked in you wouldn't swipe, tap, nod, whatever, you would just grab your drink and go. So I walk up to this guy's office, and there's a camera, and a screen that shows me my face, and it pulls down a match from the internet of my face. Like with a little rectangular box and some matrix-y numbers side by side, and it says, "Welcome Ryan Doyle." I'm like, "Oh, this is weird." So I go in, and he's telling me about the launch. They're talking about these pieces of third party data that they've been using at this coffee shop downstairs to test this out. Where someone will come in and they'll say, "Hey Boris, welcome back. Do you want this latte? Your significant other loves it too." Or, "Maybe you'd like to try this," or, "How's your dog?" or, "How's your child?" On the creepiness scale, they found that mentioning someone's dog was much creepier than mentioning how their children were.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:02:46] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, but, they ran into the issue of, a couple of people they talked to about their dogs, their dogs had passed away.   [0:02:51] PJ Bruno: Oh God.   [0:02:52] Ryan Doyle: Doesn't happen as frequently with children I suppose.   [0:02:55] PJ Bruno: You hate to see that.   [0:02:56] Ryan Doyle: You hate to see it.   [0:02:57] Boris Revechkis: That's all very disheartening.   [0:02:59] PJ Bruno: I mean, you got to walk that line between personalizing and not going too personal.   [0:03:03] Ryan Doyle: Too personal.   [0:03:04] PJ Bruno: I feel like that's same thing goes for conversation in general. Anyways, thank you Ryan for that little tid bit.   [0:03:09] Ryan Doyle: Yeah. It was an interesting night on the live.   [0:03:12] PJ Bruno: That's good. That's good. So we got a lot to get to today. Really excited to jump in. Our first article, Amazon Isn't Interested in Making the World a Better Place by Kara Swisher from New York Times. This is, we all know that, I mean, most of us probably know at this point if you live in New York City that Amazon pulled out of their second HQ that they planned to have in Long Island city. Boris, you're a Long Island city boy.   [0:03:37] Boris Revechkis: I am. I'm a Long Island city resident.   [0:03:39] PJ Bruno: Were you excited to potentially have them move into the neighborhood?   [0:03:43] Boris Revechkis: Not particularly, and I don't think there were many in the neighborhood who were. Yeah, I have a lot of mixed feelings. Obviously, we working in tech, in some sense, have a horse in the race, but I don't know that they really considered the effect on the surrounding community. Obviously the backlash reflects that.   [0:04:04] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:04:04] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:04:05] Boris Revechkis: I think they could've done a lot better job in laying the ground work for that. A few weeks ago, I tweeted, which seven I think, at least seven people read that Amazon should just take some of the benefit that they were getting in taxes and just plow that into the subway system. Just be like, "Here. Love us."   [0:04:24] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:04:25] Boris Revechkis: Then, "Okay, fine. Now we have, okay, we have common interest."   [0:04:28] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:04:28] Boris Revechkis: Be a part of the community. Contribute.   [0:04:30] Ryan Doyle: It's a corporate good will.   [0:04:30] PJ Bruno: It's as easy as that. Right?   [0:04:31] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Kind of like get the public on your side, and it just didn't seem like they really cared what people thought about the whole situation.   [0:04:37] Ryan Doyle: They were shopping for a deal.   [0:04:38] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Pretty much.   [0:04:38] PJ Bruno: I guess so. Yeah, I think a lot of the uproar came up, I think Miss Swisher put it so well in her article. "In an era when all kinds of public services are being cut in the city's infrastructure is crumbling, why is a trillion dollar corporation getting so much?" Then it was finally revealed how much, $3 billion in tax breaks.   [0:04:57] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:04:58] Ryan Doyle: I think-   [0:04:58] PJ Bruno: So people were kind of up in arms.   [0:05:00] Boris Revechkis: This is really reflective, I think, of the whole, and this second article we'll talk about later, the whole combination of these factors where you just have a system that's sort of out of wack. The incentives that drive progress are now driving outcomes that are clearly undesirable. Like, this article doesn't hold back in that regard, but like I love the phrase "modern [hellscape]". Like shooter for to San Francisco is a modern [hellscape], which is, that's strong language.   [0:05:24] Ryan Doyle: That's really strong.   [0:05:25] Boris Revechkis: That's strong language and-   [0:05:27] PJ Bruno: Pretty polarizing.   [0:05:29] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. Obviously she's talking about genuine problems, but is that direction we want to go in, or is that something we want to try and tweak the system so that we don't get pushed in these directions? I do think that the Amazon move into the city was something that would exacerbate the kind of issues that would push us in that direction, in the direction of problems like San Francisco has.   [0:05:50] Ryan Doyle: There was like an argument on the other side of it where the incentives that we were handing out as a city to get them here, we're far, far below what we would gain in economic incentives. Part of the argument was like, "Well, we're not giving them anything tangible. There's three billion in tax credits and what not," so it's not money that exists-   [0:06:07] Boris Revechkis: A future tax, yeah revenue.   [0:06:09] Ryan Doyle: And ready to put somewhere else, but I feel like my personal notion is that that money does come from somewhere. It comes from us in our future taxes, and part of it did come out of New York state incentives to bring new businesses here. It would've retired 1.5 billion out of a $2 billion grant that companies get for moving business to New York state. I just think part of the sentiment that I agree with is maybe people in general are tired of this trickle down notion where we put up a big amount of money, or some type of incentive with the hope that it would come back to us. I think we've just been fatigued with that type of situation over and over.   [0:06:45] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I think that's spot on.   [0:06:48] Boris Revechkis: In terms of concentrating the wealth too, we can, ideally, we would just replace that same activity by encouraging many other smaller companies to come to New York instead of one giant company. And trying to encourage the same type of outcome, but by spreading that tax revenue, or rather, break around to other companies and other industries.   [0:07:11] Ryan Doyle: I mean, Braze is here. We're about to move to a new office in New York City. Where's the incentive? You know?   [0:07:16] Boris Revechkis: That's true.   [0:07:17] PJ Bruno: Where's the tax breaks guys? I was surprised to see Amazon buckle so quickly. You know? It just seems like at the first sign of scrutiny, boom, they're out. Now it seems like they just want to bolster their office in D.C. I was very surprised that they didn't-   [0:07:33] Boris Revechkis: I think it becomes like a no-win scenario for them, because having to fight back all the negative attention if they tried to negotiate, the publicizing of the negotiations would probably be very damaging I think. So I think they decided it was just, "Why do this?"   [0:07:47] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, and I wonder if they'd had so little investment in New York already. I mean, it was just in word that they were coming here. So far, this deal is only how old that another city might've reached about, but, "Look, here's the incentive, we can provide. If New York doesn't want it, we'll give it to you."   [0:08:02] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:02] Ryan Doyle: Maybe that's yet to be announced. I thought I heard Nashville somewhere out in the ether that that might be the other location they go to.   [0:08:09] Boris Revechkis: But it's also, it's not like they're not here. Right? They have an office here. They have many employees here. They're going to continue hiring and expanding in New York and their existing office. So it's not like all or nothing. It's so-   [0:08:19] PJ Bruno: They have a foot hole.   [0:08:20] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:20] PJ Bruno: They didn't feel like they were losing much I guess.   [0:08:22] Boris Revechkis: Right.   [0:08:22] Ryan Doyle: Yep.   [0:08:23] PJ Bruno: Well, I for one, being an Astorian, and that's in Astoria for those of you who don't know.   [0:08:28] Boris Revechkis: Nice.   [0:08:28] PJ Bruno: I'm thrilled that there's not going to be so much congestion, and it's not going to turn into a complete circus on my train.   [0:08:35] Ryan Doyle: Your apartment's going to stay nice and cheap.   [0:08:37] PJ Bruno: You know what? Let's hope so. As long as I can not have a lease, and as long as my landlord just keeps all the stuff off the books, you didn't hear that here.   [0:08:47] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, we're going to cut that out.   [0:08:48] Boris Revechkis: Yeah, we'll take that out. We'll take that out in post.   [0:08:50] Ryan Doyle: That's fine.   [0:08:50] Boris Revechkis: Perfect.   [0:08:52] PJ Bruno: Perfect. All right, well let's move on to the big topic this week. As you guys know, Davos, which we all know at this point is the knight, former smuggler in service of Stannis Baratheon from Game of Thrones-   [0:09:06] Boris Revechkis: The onion knight. Man, I love the onion knight.   [0:09:07] PJ Bruno: I'm just so curious, like what's going to happen to him in the final season. That's what I really want to know.   [0:09:11] Ryan Doyle: I've never watched Game of Thrones, and you really lost me there for a second.   [0:09:15] Boris Revechkis: Wow.   [0:09:15] Ryan Doyle: I feel like I want to wait for it to all be released.   [0:09:18] Boris Revechkis: Can we just edit Ryan out of the entire podcast?   [0:09:19] Ryan Doyle: No, no, no. See, I've got the plan. They're going to release all of Game of Thrones. I'm not going to deal with all this anxiety and anticipation. I'm just going to watch it when I feel like it.   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: You're really good at planning anxiety out of your life these days. Like, any time you identify it-   [0:09:31] Ryan Doyle: That's why I'm hanging out with you last.   [0:09:33] PJ Bruno: Wow. I noticed that. The patterns are starting to, this is a loaded moment.   [0:09:37] Boris Revechkis: This is a loaded moment. I'm not watching the last season, I'm just saying. I can't I refuse to watch it until the books come out.   [0:09:41] PJ Bruno: You can't do it?   [0:09:42] Boris Revechkis: I need the books. I need the books. Give me the books. Are you listening George R. R. Martin? You're out there, aren't you? I know you're listening to this podcast. Finish the damn book.   [0:09:52] PJ Bruno: Let me course correct a little bit. Davos, of course we're talking about the world economic forum that went down just last week I believe. There's this great article that Tim Leberecht did for Ink Magazine called Purpose Washing, Hustle Culture, and Automation: Business at a Crossroads. It's just a really good, I mean, I love his opening statement here, so let me just read it for you guys to get us in the zone. "Business leaders today must constantly wrestle with opposing forces. They must embrace data, and at the same time listen to their gut feelings. They must cater to efficiency pressures, and also create a culture of trust and creativity. They must ensure short-term profit, while thinking about the long-term impact of their business, acting as 'civic CEOs', stewarding 'woke brands'. Now some may call this ambidexterity, or others schizophrenia. At any rate, it's not surprising that being stuck in the middle of such dichotomy breeds uncomfortable tension and conflicting rhetoric. Double agendas can lead to double speak." You guys read this one, right?   [0:10:58] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, that's heavy.   [0:10:58] Boris Revechkis: Sure did.   [0:11:00] PJ Bruno: Oh, it's heavy. I mean, any initial thoughts? Ryan, you want to kick us off here? We're going to edit you out, but just go ahead.   [0:11:09] Ryan Doyle: Just on the whole topic of Davos, there was ... I just found it so interesting, like its kind of come to the head as like our own New York representative, who was kind of in this Amazon fight. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been talking about this certain type of marginal tax rate, and those things get brought up at Davos. People laugh at it, but it was the reality for a long time in America to have a very high tax rate marginally on a certain group of users. So, just to hear these topics brought back up right now, and then at Davos, it all just seems so timely. Then was kind of kicked off, I think again yesterday when that Tucker Carlson-   [0:11:50] PJ Bruno: Thing with Fox News.   [0:11:51] Boris Revechkis: So beautiful. Can I just call out how amazing it was that you said, "Users," instead of, "Tax payers"?   [0:11:56] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:11:56] Boris Revechkis: Love it. That's Braze life right there.   [0:12:00] Ryan Doyle: I just got out of a sales conversation, so let me reset. Let me reset.   [0:12:03] PJ Bruno: Rewire.   [0:12:04] Boris Revechkis: We have 300 million users in this country.   [0:12:07] PJ Bruno: You got any hot takes from the article here?   [0:12:09] Boris Revechkis: There were a lot of big ideas in this article. A lot of it was about inequality in general, which is, you know, that's a trip. We can spend a lot of time on that. A lot of it was about AI, and refers back to what we were talking about earlier with that company doing face recognition, and privacy, and responsibility. Like in the quote you read, the pressure, the tension between using data, and exploiting data, and making people uncomfortable. I thought it was interesting that the Microsoft CEO had come out in favor of a US version of a GDPR, which is very cool.   [0:12:38] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:12:39] Boris Revechkis: I mean obviously, I think at Braze we're very much behind that idea.   [0:12:42] Ryan Doyle: We would love that.   [0:12:42] Boris Revechkis: We would love that idea.   [0:12:43] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:12:44] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. I think that speaks to that sort of idea of responsibility. Right? Don't use data in ways that makes people uncomfortable when they're picking up coffee.   [0:12:52] Ryan Doyle: Don't mention their poor, dead dog.   [0:12:55] Boris Revechkis: Yeah, exactly. Maybe what we need is actually some legislation to create some barriers, some boundaries so that collectively we're not cringing when we walk by an advertisement and it's asking us about our last doctor's visit.   [0:13:09] Ryan Doyle: Jeez. Well, if I could just add in, I think one of the reasons we haven't had legislation is, this was in one of those articles that kind of attack myth that's been going on for a long time. That Silicon Valley is here to save the world. All these tech founders come in, and they have an idea that will not only benefit us in a business sense, but, "We are going to change the world to be a better place." Maybe that's why legislation has been so slow to get up behind it, because we not only know what people are doing with our data because it's such a new occurrence, but we kind of trust these people who say that they are going to change the world for the better. So, I think we're starting to see for the first time that might not be the case.   [0:13:49] PJ Bruno: But that's the thing. Does that mean that if you decide to start a company and become a tech entrepreneur, it is now on you to make the world a better place? Like, obviously I think if you have the means, you should try to give back, but does that mean it's just a given? It's inherent anytime a tech leader tries to start something new? Is it, "Well, you know, keep in mind you must be giving back"? You know, or is it just like, "You need to pretend to give back"?   [0:14:15] Boris Revechkis: Question for life.   [0:14:16] PJ Bruno: Question for life.   [0:14:17] Ryan Doyle: I think because, is it our duty as human beings to always try to make the world a little bit better of a place? Not just tech founders PJ.   [0:14:24] PJ Bruno: Jeez.   [0:14:26] Boris Revechkis: Jeez. Personally, I don't know whoever believed that the full T-tech industry would unequivocally and unambiguously make the world a better place without making profit first. Like, our society, corporations, businesses, are economy is structured around organization which are obligated to increase value to shareholders.   [0:14:49] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:14:50] Boris Revechkis: Put the shareholders interests first. Like, that's how our society is organized. It's great that tech founders want to make the world a better place. Anyone who does want to, it's great, but the reality is that when a company becomes large enough, and then also becomes publicly traded, you are obligated to make certain kinds of decisions. That's the way our society is structured. An interesting counter pointer alternative to that approach would be something like a B corporation, which is something that's come up in like the last decade or so, which is kind of cool.   [0:15:22] Ryan Doyle: What's that?   [0:15:23] Boris Revechkis: It's like a non-profit that basically has come up with this, so they're like S corps and C corps. They're like the, C corps are the most common and all that. This is like a non-profit that says, "We'll certify you as a B corporation," which means you're not just looking out for your share duty to your shareholders, but you're also incorporating into every decision you make, you're impact on the community, on the environment, on society at large. It's very difficult, and not a lot of huge brands have done this yet.   [0:15:51] Ryan Doyle: Are their any examples?   [0:15:53] PJ Bruno: I was about to say-   [0:15:53] Boris Revechkis: Like Ben & Jerry's.   [0:15:54] Ryan Doyle: Like an honest corporation?   [0:15:54] Boris Revechkis: Kickstarter is a B corporation I think.   [0:15:56] PJ Bruno: Ben & Jerry's?   [0:15:58] Ryan Doyle: Of course they are.   [0:15:58] PJ Bruno: I knew I liked those.   [0:15:59] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:15:59] Boris Revechkis: It's not widely popular yet, but because it's really onerous, because you're now saddling like your board and your whole organization with this responsibility, because you're not just here to make us money. You're here to think about your impact on everyone, your employees, your customers, your surrounding community, the environment, etc., etc.   [0:16:14] Ryan Doyle: Right.   [0:16:15] Boris Revechkis: In conjunction with your financial responsibilities and interests. So it's not easy, but the idea being that we're trying to change the incentives, or this is an attempt to change the incentives corporations to do better.   [0:16:28] Ryan Doyle: We don't have to legislate that as a norm, but it would be cool to incentivize those types of bigs, just to have a little more people who are thinking in that mindset.   [0:16:37] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:16:37] Ryan Doyle: Yeah.   [0:16:39] PJ Bruno: Sorry. One of the things they picked out from this article, that I thought was an interesting thing, was the idea of reinventing capitalism. Is it a business or a government affair? I mean, I'm curious to know what you guys think, because my instinct is that it should be ... Maybe I'm just more regulation prone, because at this point, there's like a lot of bullies in the game with a lot of money and a lot to lose. We need to level the playing field a little bit, but yeah. I mean it just, I don't know. Who's it on?   [0:17:13] Ryan Doyle: I think that it has to be a dance, because it takes two to tangle. Right? Business is not going to have a direction without regulation, and regulation won't have anything to regulate without the growth of business.   [0:17:23] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:17:23] Ryan Doyle: I just read this interesting book on Teddy Roosevelt, and some of his first run-ins with monopolistic industries, and how he really came to be known as the trust buster. It's just interesting this dance that happens where there might be a little give with business, and then government does a little take, but then government gives a little over here. Then there's a little more take by business. So, I think it's definitely something that happens in parallel. I just think that we might be asking it because business seems to be moving faster at the moment.   [0:17:52] Boris Revechkis: Yeah. I think there's sort of this ideal that is always pushed that from the very start of a company to the point where it's Amazon's size, it can operate under the assumption that growing is always good, and representing a larger share of your market is better always. But ultimately, we have to recognize that, in a purely mathematical dynamical system sense, when you get that big your constraints are now different. You're not just like a fish swimming through the sea. You can now touch the edges of the sea. Right? You're like, it's a fish tank now and you're a big fish, and every motion of yours, you're hitting the walls and you're crushing other fish.   [0:18:35] Ryan Doyle: That's a good way to put it.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it is.   [0:18:35] Boris Revechkis: Also, you have to, the rules of the game have now changed. The rules, as far as government is concerned, have to account for that. You can't just treat that big fish like a tiny fish in the ocean.   [0:18:46] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:18:46] Boris Revechkis: With where the limits are, pretty much unreachable once you've started to actually hit the edges of the tank, like the rules of the game need to change. Otherwise, things will go wrong. I think that's just pretty much what monopolies are and why that happened 130 years ago, 140 years ago, and why we're running into it now with tech companies. Government is behind in this industry because we have people who ask Mark Zuckerberg in congressional hearings how his company makes money. They have no idea what they're talking about, and they're just completely out of their depth. Therefore, we're now in a situation where these companies are just occupying such a vast proportion of these industries, that their every decision rocks the boat, to use another ocean, water.   [0:19:28] Ryan Doyle: I like how it metaphors dude.   [0:19:29] PJ Bruno: Doesn't resonate with me.   [0:19:30] Ryan Doyle: I'm a big fish in a small tank.   [0:19:34] Boris Revechkis: So, yeah. I mean, we just have to, we have to come to the terms of the fact that we need to, and even the companies themselves need to realize like, "Hey, you're not just a company anymore that's striving to get more customers and generate more revenue. You have such an outsize influence on your surrounding society that you have to think ahead." It's like the same thing with climate change. You can't, not to invoke another massively complicated and heavy topic-   [0:19:58] Ryan Doyle: You're not getting deep enough here yet.   [0:19:59] PJ Bruno: We'll save it.   [0:19:59] Ryan Doyle: Yeah, we'll save it.   [0:20:00] Boris Revechkis: Like, you have to be aware of your outputs and what you're doing to the surrounding area. You can't just keep throwing poison into the river and assuming it'll wash away to the ocean, when now the whole river is tainted, and the ocean is tainted, and whatever, whatever.   [0:20:13] Ryan Doyle: Still talking about metaphors.   [0:20:14] Boris Revechkis: Total a metaphor.   [0:20:15] PJ Bruno: Yeah. A little real life too.   [0:20:18] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:20:18] PJ Bruno: Cool. I mean, any closing thoughts from you two before we wrap her up?   [0:20:23] Ryan Doyle: I mean, I just had one question in all of this to ask Boris, because we touched a little bit on AI and machine learning today. I wanted to ask with Boris, specifically his role here has to do with AI and machine learning. I guess, how do your moral obligations play into your day-to-day role or how you see yourself in the AI industry and learning industry? Do you ever think about the impact your decisions or your work has, and if so, how do you try to exercise judgment in the work you put out?   [0:20:53] Boris Revechkis: I mean, the short answer is absolutely. The more involved answer that we may or may not have time for-   [0:20:59] Ryan Doyle: It's a big closing question.   [0:21:00] Boris Revechkis: It is. It is.   [0:21:00] PJ Bruno: I love it.   [0:21:01] Boris Revechkis: The bottom line is that we have to, you know. Braze as a company, I think, embraces the idea that we have to be responsible with our choices and we have to consider their impacts on people. So, we have to be mindful of how we allow our own customers to use data to influence their relationships with their own end users in a way that is responsible. To use another analogy, here we go again, the way I like to think of it, if you were just like a general store owner in the old west. Your customers are coming in, and you have a business, and you're trying to see where you're making money, where you're losing money. You would find your best customers, you would try to figure out what they want, and you would cater your business to insure your own livelihood and well being. So in a lot of ways, our customers are trying to do the same thing, but they're trying to do it for millions of their own customers. So of course they can't do it, and they can't have an army of people trying to parse all the data and interactions that they have with all their customers. You need machines. You need algorithms to go and figure out what the patterns are so you can say, "Oh, this pool of customers like products x, y, z. We should focus in this area. We should cater to these customers. We should communicate with them more. Here are the customers that are disaffected. They're not interested in us anymore. Why are they not interested? We need to do better." Right? It's like those common sense questions that any business own would ask, we're now just using machine learning and AI. We're helping our own customers use machine learning and AI to answer those questions, just at a scale that's unmanageable to do without those tools. Again, long answer, but as long as we're doing that without using data in a way that would clearly make people uncomfortable and would leverage data that they don't want us-   [0:22:36] Ryan Doyle: We'll use data we didn't have the right to use.   [0:22:37] Boris Revechkis: Exactly. So I mean, GDPR is really like almost the shield for this. Right? Like, "Hey, we're just not going to use data in ways that is irresponsible or that people don't want us to do in order to further these ends." But when people are explicitly told what's going to happen to their data, and how we and our customers are going to use it, and they're okay with that, great. That's sort of what it comes down to.   [0:23:01] Ryan Doyle: Thank you for answering that.   [0:23:02] PJ Bruno: Yeah, I appreciate that too.   [0:23:03] Boris Revechkis: Yeah.   [0:23:04] PJ Bruno: I want to close it out real quick. I think this article is so good, and I really love the closing paragraphs. So this is how he summed it all up. "A perfect storm is brewing: the agony of old systems, the void left by less and less trustworthy tech platforms, the disruption of the labor markets by the fourth industrial revolution, and the critical importance of reinventing capitalism and redefining the meaning of meaningful work. In the middle of conflicting agendas, CEOs will have to make tough choices. The most responsible of them know they will have their role to place in tackling all these issues, but are also humble enough to realize that, now more than ever, business can't do it alone." Is that a cough drop?   [0:23:51] Boris Revechkis: Sorry. I had to get a cough drop.   [0:23:52] PJ Bruno: All right. Well, signing off, this is PJ Bruno.   [0:23:56] Ryan Doyle: This is Ryan Doyle.   [0:23:57] Boris Revechkis: And Boris Revechkis.   [0:23:58] PJ Bruno: You guys take care. Come see us again sometime. [0:24:00]

This week, Taylor Gibb from the customer success team at Braze brought in Senior CSM, Jordan Houghton, to discuss how she met her husband on OKCupid. Match Group finally acquires Hinge, adding to it's caché of dating apps, and don't forget about Bounce (the dating app on which you can do nothing EXCEPT meet for a date that very evening).     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:02] PJ Bruno: On this Valentine's Day, me and the team would like to say, whether you're swiping for fun or looking for that special one, whether you're cuffing at home, or just love being alone, if you're going to give a gift, make sure it's relevant, personalized, and well timed. That apple of your eye wants nothing that isn't personal, and poorly timed, well, that's a crime. So, this year, kiddies, avoid the mess of a shameful Valentine's tragedy. Keep it personal, and treat your valentine like your customer engagement strategy.   [0:00:36] The Captain: This is the captain. Brace for impact.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest, and I'm so thrilled today to have back again by population demand Taylor Gibb from CS. How you doing, Taylor?   [0:00:58] Taylor Gibb: I am excited to be here. This is a big one.   [0:01:01] PJ Bruno: It is.   [0:01:02] Taylor Gibb: This is an inaugural run of me on this podcast on Valentine's Day in 2019.   [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: It is, and you brought a buddy with you, I see. You have a friend.   [0:01:10] Taylor Gibb: I definitely did. We roll deep in succeed, I like to say, so I brought one of the very best, and I'm apparently rhyming.   [0:01:15] Jordan: No. This is Jordan.   [0:01:18] Taylor Gibb: Jordan, guys, it is so good to have you here, and I really wanted to lean into our Valentine's Day festive podcast here.   [0:01:26] PJ Bruno: Ooh, I'm intrigued.   [0:01:26] Taylor Gibb: I brought a little theme in to guide today, because you know we're all thinking about love. A lot of us in New York City are kind of looking for that special date tonight, a lot of restaurant reservations out there-   [0:01:36] PJ Bruno: Don't you know it?   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: ... So I wanted to kind of focus in on dating apps today, and Jordan, I brought you in not just because you've got a silky smooth voice-   [0:01:45] Jordan: Oh, thank you very much.   [0:01:47] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, absolutely, but because I know that you actually... You've got a particular stance on dating apps, or at least the way that they were a couple of years ago. Do you care to elaborate there?   [0:01:56] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:01:56] Jordan: I am a success story of dating apps. I met my husband on OkCupid.   [0:02:01] PJ Bruno: How about that?   [0:02:02] Taylor Gibb: That's right. Yeah. I brought in one of the very best. Jordan, tell me about your OkCupid experience there.   [0:02:09] Jordan: Okay. So, this was a few years ago. I had absolutely no intention of meeting anybody online. I just wanted to make a profile, maybe have some people reach out, make me feel a little bit better about myself, never thought I'd actually go out in person, and met some really great people, and met my husband.   [0:02:27] Taylor Gibb: That is a huge success story, and I always used to think that was rare, that you were more likely to run into a dud than you were the one, but these success stories are getting more and more prevalent. I think I saw a statistic that it's expected something wild, like 71% of couples in the year 2025 will have met online.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: What?   [0:02:45] Taylor Gibb: I saw that, and I thought that was just absolutely crazy because it seems like maybe five years ago that the idea of dating online was this kind of... I don't know.   [0:02:54] Jordan: No. I made the mistake of telling my mom, as I was walking to my first online date, that I actually had made a profile on OkCupid, and I was going to meet somebody, and I'm from Kansas originally, and she was literally screaming into the phone, begging me to either go to a public place, or turn around and walk home, because you don't know who you're going to meet, and they could very much be an ax murderer.   [0:03:14] PJ Bruno: So, the advice there is don't always listen to Mom?   [0:03:17] Taylor Gibb: If we wanted to tell you one thing here in this podcast, it's don't listen to your mom.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: It could cost you the love of your life.   [0:03:23] Taylor Gibb: Come on.   [0:03:24] PJ Bruno: So, wait. Was this the mobile app, or this is the-   [0:03:26] Jordan: This was the mobile app.   [0:03:27] PJ Bruno: Okay, cool.   [0:03:28] Jordan: I got really addicted to swiping.   [0:03:29] Taylor Gibb: An early adopter.   [0:03:30] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:30] PJ Bruno: Early, early adoption.   [0:03:31] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:32] Taylor Gibb: I love that.   [0:03:33] Jordan: I was very much into it.   [0:03:34] Taylor Gibb: You know, we're going to dig into a little bit more on kind of the dating apps, the pros and cons, ways they're changing here later, but I would be remiss if I didn't have a mini intro for you, PJ-   [0:03:44] PJ Bruno: Oh, really?   [0:03:44] Taylor Gibb: ... Because I know, and without going too far into detail, I know that you've used your share of dating apps, maybe a bit of a connoisseur.   [0:03:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, wow.   [0:03:52] Jordan: A connoisseur of dating apps.   [0:03:52] PJ Bruno: Where are you getting your information?   [0:03:54] Taylor Gibb: I don't know.   [0:03:55] PJ Bruno: You been through my phone?   [0:03:57] Taylor Gibb: I've been swiping through your phone when I was testing earlier.   [0:03:59] PJ Bruno: You know, I like to do research, so I like to... I have Hinge on my phone. I think that's pretty neat. We're going to touch on Hinge soon. I've tried Tinder, I've tried Bumble, and there's something to be said for it. I think I can argue for both sides. There's something very cool, especially in a city like New York, the ability to connect with random people that, honestly, I have a handful of people that are still friends to this day that I met on dating apps, so that's a cool thing, but then, of course, other side of the coin, you start to not appreciate people as much. They're just so easily dismissible, and you just don't really put the time that's required to build something that matter and lasts.   [0:04:37] Jordan: Oh, tell me-   [0:04:37] Taylor Gibb: We kind of forget that they're human beings because they're just a sound bite, maybe a picture, and one thing about them that may or may not have caught your eye, and you forget that, hopefully, they're a fully fleshed human being on the other side that might be waiting for your text, or might but hoping that you swipe right on them. I think it's really easy to have choice paralysis when there's an endless array of options.   [0:04:57] PJ Bruno: Totally. Well, that leads really nicely into our first little article here, which may be the solution to that swipe paralysis, or whatever you want to call it, people not willing to jump in and get stuck in and meet someone in person. We're really thrilled, actually, to be able to plug a good friend of ours. A previous coworker from Braze, Dylan Petro, was able to launch his dating app, Bounce, and all you can do on the app is date. Right? There no chatting?   [0:05:26] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:27] PJ Bruno: It's just literally you connect, and that night, the date, it's on. They pick a spot. Is that right?   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:31] Jordan: They do.   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: That's right, and I have to say, I actually was one of the first users of this app. I remember Dylan gave a special code to a beta group of testers, and there's something really exciting about it. Right? You get a notification on your phone... First of all, love notifications here at Braze, so having get ready to go on a date, that's amazing to get delivered to your lock screen.   [0:05:53] Jordan: It also makes sense, though, because it is so time-sensitive, it's not just so-and-so likes you, or you have 35 swipe right people, but it's like, you have a date in 25 minutes, or two hours from now, so it's very time-sensitive, so that's the right channel, in my opinion. An email could get lost in your inbox.   [0:06:09] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely, and it's funny, too. This article that we brought up here says that this is the perfect dating app for Millennials who have this kind of analysis paralysis. It even said anything that I'm unfortunately very familiar with. It's like swiping through Netflix, and you've got so many options that you just end up looking at the options for an hour and going to bed.   [0:06:27] PJ Bruno: Yep, yep.   [0:06:28] Taylor Gibb: This is exactly what I do every time, and so when it comes to dating, absolutely, I'm going to keep swiping.   [0:06:33] PJ Bruno: That's the thing. It's like, because, I don't know, you always go back to the well, and I'm a big Netflix browser, and some people are just like, “Oh, my God. Pick something,” but I enjoy going through all the stuff and just keep scrolling and scrolling, and so sometimes I get into that mode with swiping. It becomes-   [0:06:51] Jordan: Definitely.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: I mean, they've gamified it. Right?   [0:06:53] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:06:53] PJ Bruno: So, it's like you're talking to someone, and I don't know, there's always that incentive get back in and continue to swipe.   [0:06:59] Jordan: My girlfriends, they have a rule that if you've been texting for more than three days and they haven't mentioned a date, to cut it out right then-   [0:07:05] PJ Bruno: That's a pretty good rule.   [0:07:05] Jordan: ... Because they're not necessarily interested in dating, so Bounce is so interesting because it's forcing you to say, “I actually want to meet someone tonight. My makeup's already on. I got my shoes on. Let's go. Let's not just go back and forth and then just flow into the ether of ghosting.”   [0:07:18] PJ Bruno: Right. Right.   [0:07:18] Taylor Gibb: Definitely, and I know that PJ hates when he puts on his makeup, expecting to go out on a day. He's got it all, and then they ghost him.   [0:07:25] Jordan: He's got the shoes on, he's got the mascara ready to go.   [0:07:26] Taylor Gibb: God, and he just looks so good, so fly.   [0:07:28] PJ Bruno: When you put that much time into it, of course you're going to be upset when nothing comes to fruition.   [0:07:31] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:07:32] Jordan: Lord knows, you're not going to meet someone in real life, so why would you actually go out unless you've got a date already planned?   [0:07:37] PJ Bruno: Exactly. That's silly.   [0:07:38] Taylor Gibb: So, here's the devil's advocate thing, though. I find that some of my friends who are maybe a little more shy, a little more reserved, really like to put in that emotional groundwork before they meet somebody. Love the idea of being on Hinge and being able to message for weeks. It's kind of a... You've got your Jane Austen pen pal romance a little bit.   [0:07:54] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it's a vetting process.   [0:07:55] Taylor Gibb: There's something to be said, right?   [0:07:56] PJ Bruno: There is.   [0:07:56] Taylor Gibb: Because it may be that for a certain kind of person, well, maybe for anybody, it's scary to meet somebody that night not knowing much about them. Right?   [0:08:03] PJ Bruno: Absolutely, and I'll say about Hinge, actually, out of all the apps that I've used, Hinge is pretty good about giving you more than just, okay, this is what a person looks like. They have those little prompts. Have you seen these texts? It's just like-   [0:08:14] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah. Oh, I love those little prompts.   [0:08:16] PJ Bruno: It's thing like, “Something I'll never do again is,” or, “One thing I'm weirdly attracted to is,” and it just is three prompts that you can pick what they are, and it just tells you a little bit about themselves, and if it's funny or quirky and weird, it's just kind of like, oh, okay, I can get down with this. So, it's kind of like-   [0:08:31] Jordan: That's why I loved OkCupid. The concept of just meeting someone because they're within a hundred feet of me and good looking freaked me out. So, I think I answered, I'm not kidding, maybe 300 or 400 questions. It was like an SAT that I filled out to potentially meet the love of my life, and it was actually really interesting, some of the questions that I differed with people. Yeah, it was really interesting to me because I'm similarly of the mind of you, Taylor, that I don't necessarily want to meet a stranger unless I'm literally in the same place as them. The idea of leaving my house and meeting a complete stranger would've freaked me out a little bit, so I think having both sides of it, either I know what you look like, I know what you think like, I know what you believe, I know what we're doing, we're both interested in sushi. Cool. Okay.   [0:09:15] PJ Bruno: One thing I'll say for the audience out there is even if you're using dating apps, and you're not quite finding that special one, you're losing if you're not learning, so at least take stuff away from it. For example-   [0:09:25] Taylor Gibb: You're losing if you're not learning. I like that.   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: ... Two things I found, just call it research, one is that apparently I look different in every picture I own.   [0:09:34] Taylor Gibb: Great.   [0:09:34] PJ Bruno: So, apparently I look different in every photo, one, and two, girls who own cats are less likely to own guns than girls who have dogs.   [0:09:43] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting because you would think it's a little utilitarian.   [0:09:44] PJ Bruno: I'm a dog-   [0:09:45] Jordan: Have you met a lot of gun-wielding dog owners in New York?   [0:09:48] PJ Bruno: Actually, I don't run into them personally. I'm just telling you from the series of photos I see-   [0:09:52] Jordan: Oh, interesting.   [0:09:53] PJ Bruno: ... There's cat girls, and I'm like, “Cool. I like you. I'm allergic to cats, though, so sorry,” and then girls... Not all dog girls have guns, but there are way more dog girls that have guns than cat girls.   [0:10:03] Jordan: I will tell you a learning that I... I have two learnings. One, if you are taking a mirror selfie in a restroom, I'm probably not going to swipe right on you.   [0:10:12] PJ Bruno: Well, you're married, but...   [0:10:14] Jordan: Thank you very much. Tristan, I am not swiping.   [0:10:16] Taylor Gibb: She might be researching, PJ.   [0:10:17] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're doing research. That's right.   [0:10:18] Jordan: Absolute research. But no, I also realized there's a game of which person are you in this picture that I love to play, where it's like you see a group, and you're like, oh, I really hope you're the second from the right, and then there's that two second of anticipation of swiping to the next picture and being like, oh, no, you are the guy on the left, or you're the one in the back that's just at the very end of the photo. It's such a fun game because it's so exhilarating.   [0:10:45] Taylor Gibb: He's the guy photo bombing in the background.   [0:10:46] Jordan: Yes. Yeah. No, it's my favorite part. Who are you? Which on are you?   [0:10:50] Taylor Gibb: Who are you?   [0:10:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, my gosh.   [0:10:52] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of who are you, one thing I forgot to ask that I loved to hear is, I believe back in the day of OkCupid, maybe still, you would have a screen name that you'd have to put out there. Right?   [0:11:02] Jordan: Oh, gosh. Yes.   [0:11:02] Taylor Gibb: I want to hear about your screen name, Jordan. I almost forgot to ask.   [0:11:06] Jordan: Oh, my gosh. I'm going to be giving you all my secrets now.   [0:11:09] Taylor Gibb: That's what this is about.   [0:11:09] Jordan: So, my screen name, true story, I made a profile and a password, so I made a username and a password, and it sat for six months because I was too mortified, this was five, six years ago, to actually add pictures and meet someone online. My username is [Rockjock3213].   [0:11:28] Taylor Gibb: [Rockjock], like rock climbing?   [0:11:29] Jordan: Some people would reach out about that.   [0:11:31] PJ Bruno: I thought it was like rock show.   [0:11:32] Jordan: So, mine's Rockjock, [J-hock 00:11:34]. It's a KU slang. I'm from Kansas, so it was important to me that I mentioned the fact that I love Kansas, I love sports, and 3213 are two of my lucky numbers.   [0:11:43] PJ Bruno: So, say it again, one more time.   [0:11:44] Jordan: Oh, gosh.   [0:11:45] Taylor Gibb: We'd love to look this up. Everybody on the air, take notes.   [0:11:48] Jordan: Rockjock3213.   [0:11:51] PJ Bruno: Sounds like a total babe. I mean-   [0:11:52] Taylor Gibb: I love it, Rockjock. Slide into those DMs.   [0:11:54] Jordan: You know, PJ, any other time, if it hadn't been Tristan, you never know.   [0:11:57] Taylor Gibb: Just waited a few more years.   [0:12:00] Jordan: If you had done OkCupid, because Tinder and Hinge, all that scared me at the time, I wasn't quite ready to delve out of the question, question, question realm.   [0:12:07] PJ Bruno: Fair.   [0:12:08] Taylor Gibb: Well, that's a good transition, too. Right?   [0:12:09] PJ Bruno: Wow. I missed the boat again, it seems.   [0:12:11] Taylor Gibb: Well, as always, [Peej], you're one canoe behind, one safety boat behind, but I was going to say, I had a great segue before you so rudely coming off. I was going to say, speaking of Hinge, Tinder, Match.com groups, we do have another little article here that speaks to a somewhere dystopian future of dating, our overlords at Match.com, and good thing or a bad thing, essential, the article says, “Match Group, which operates dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, completed its acquisition of the seven-year-old app Hinge on Thursday, following its purchase of a majority stake in June 2018.” So, we've got a bit of a monopoly of love on our hands here, which sounds like it would but a great slow jam, but is instead a monopoly of love. PJ, get on writing that.   [0:13:04] PJ Bruno: I'm going to do that.   [0:13:05] Taylor Gibb: Instead, means that there's one company that's kind of determining at least my friend group's dating lives in 2019. What is your take on it, fellow pundits?   [0:13:17] PJ Bruno: I mean, I think I speak for everyone in the room. Monopolies in general are a bad idea. Right?   [0:13:21] Taylor Gibb: You always end up throwing the board. I mean-   [0:13:23] PJ Bruno: You end up in jail.   [0:13:25] Taylor Gibb: ... I was bound to.   [0:13:25] PJ Bruno: I don't have a get out free card. Who knows? No. Yeah, I don't like this one bit, and I'm a big fan of Bumble and the whole female-centric thing that... Was it Whitney Wolfe Herd, I think the CEO [crosstalk]   [0:13:38] Taylor Gibb: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, exactly.   [0:13:40] Jordan: Previously of Tinder.   [0:13:40] PJ Bruno: Exactly. I love everything that she's done with Bumble, and they're staying strong, and they've staved off acquisition from Match Group. No, I don't like big, huge companies just absorbing and acquiring all this stuff, especially the Match CEO I guess was quoted saying, “Every person who's 18, 19, 20 should be on Tinder. We really want to be integrated into people's single social life, especially when they're young,” put the hooks in. Just because, while I said, dating apps can bring you towards a lot of really cool people, and who knows, maybe even the love of your life. I can also make you kind of be detached from society in a certain kind of way. Right? You're looking at your screen all the time. You're easily casting away person, after person, after person. I don't know. That's the thing, is I don't know if it's super good for our psyche, as far as the way that we treat people in general, and I don't know that's an outlandish thing to say.   [0:14:33] Jordan: I agree with that in the sense that one thing about choice analysis paralysis is the always consideration of what you didn't choose, so analysis paralysis being the more options you have, the more terrible your choice could be. If you had five versus 20, you could choose a statistically worse option if you had more than 20, things like that, but also, you're going to spend a lot of time thinking about the other 19 options that you didn't choose, which is very similar to dating apps.   [0:15:03] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:15:03] Jordan: I think that this concept that there's always the next person, which is also with these dating apps, their lifecycle, if they do their job, they're losing their audience. It's kind of like a babysitting app.   [0:15:16] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:15:16] Jordan: If you get the nanny you're looking for, or the before, or the girlfriend, or the partner you've been looking for, you deactivate your profile, you're done with that. The cost of acquisition just got higher. So, for them, they either need to, as you mentioned, hook me back in by always having that in the back of my mind, that there's more option and I should go back and swipe, and I miss the gamification, or they have to buy every other part of their audience, which means this massive acquisition and having this monopoly.   [0:15:43] PJ Bruno: I see. That makes sense.   [0:15:43] Taylor Gibb: That's brilliant.   [0:15:44] Jordan: So, no, it's not ideal. I think that it's changing... It's not just my thought. It's scientifically proven that it's changing the way people date, the way people interact, and I don't necessarily think it's for the best, but I think it's part of the nature of the game that everything is digital, and we want things in the palm of our hand, literally, and we don't necessarily want to have to go out. We're paying for convenience.   [0:16:06] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting, and that's a really... It's a good take I think that a lot of people share. I will say, it's also interesting to think about being one of these companies. Right? If your goal at the end of the day is technically to match people up with their perfect other person, but then that means they're off the app. Right?   [0:16:26] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:16:26] Taylor Gibb: So, I've posed this to clients before. I work with a few dating apps here at Braze, and I remember going in and saying, “Devil's advocate, if your app works perfectly, you're out of users. You don't have anybody in there. What does that make you feel like?”   [0:16:42] PJ Bruno: Right. It's a catch-22.   [0:16:42] Taylor Gibb: They said, “Honestly, we want as many marriages, as many people dropping off at the end of this as we possibly can do. When we look through the section of The New York Times, we want to see, 'We met on blank dating app. We met on this dating app,' and that's going to mean that we're really successful.” Now, of course, that's me going in in the moment as an outsider. It could be that there are other things that come from that, but-   [0:17:05] Jordan: It's de-stigmatizing it.   [0:17:07] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:17:07] Jordan: The more that you see it's prevalence, that's great. I mean, I'm just going to throw this out there. I would love an app to make friends, because I think it's so easy to meet people with the instance of dating and love, and I think building community, if it's not at your office, or it's not in a friend group that you had from college, or it's not something that's based off of your personal belief system, it's really hard to make friends, and I think that's something that would benefit everybody. I know that Bumble tried to do that, I think, with business.   [0:17:34] Taylor Gibb: Bumble BFF.   [0:17:34] PJ Bruno: That's right, yeah.   [0:17:35] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:17:35] Jordan: Oh, yeah. They did it for business, too. I don't know how... I say this, but also, I met my person online, so I can't give them too much crap because I maybe wouldn't have met him otherwise. We both lived in the same city for six years and had mutual-mutual friends, never met, so I'm very grateful they were able to find the needle in the haystack was looking for.   [0:17:55] Taylor Gibb: Most definitely, and there's an app for everything. You've got your Bumble BFF. You've got your Bumble for business. I just heard today about a new app called [Tudder], which is Tinder for cows, and if you're looking to breed your cow-   [0:18:08] PJ Bruno: [Exsqueeze] me?   [0:18:08] Taylor Gibb: ... You get online, and you find a... On Tudder, you can swipe, say, "This looks like the steer for my particular cow."   [0:18:16] PJ Bruno: But how do cows even use apps?   [0:18:20] Jordan: Is it the farmer looking for the best lady cow?   [0:18:23] Taylor Gibb: I like to think it is just a cow that's swiping over there. He's got his big hoof, and he's like, “Oh, no, no. This will never do.” [crosstalk]   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: What are the pictures of? It's just-   [0:18:31] Taylor Gibb: They're of the cows. It's absolutely 100% Tinder, just with cows.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: Is it like a group of cows, and you have to guess which cow is the one?   [0:18:40] Taylor Gibb: Yep, and it's always the shortest cow, isn't it?   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:18:42] Taylor Gibb: Always the shortest cow.   [0:18:43] PJ Bruno: It's always-   [0:18:43] Jordan: Taylor, how did you find this? Did you product hunt this, or is this from experience [crosstalk]   [0:18:49] PJ Bruno: This is a good question.   [0:18:49] Taylor Gibb: Yeah. You know, we're actually trying to get them in as a client for next year, so thanks so much.   [0:18:53] PJ Bruno: Tudder.   [0:18:54] Taylor Gibb: I've just been doing Tudder.   [0:18:55] PJ Bruno: We got our eye on you.   [0:18:56] Taylor Gibb: Look out. We're going to be sending notifications. Is your cow lonely?   [0:19:00] PJ Bruno: You know, just real briefly, I want to come back... I love that whole idea because Hinge says designed to be deleted. Right?   [0:19:07] Taylor Gibb: Yes.   [0:19:07] PJ Bruno: That's their tagline.   [0:19:09] Taylor Gibb: That's it.   [0:19:09] PJ Bruno: I love that that's their mission and standpoint, is to get everyone to get off of it. I don't really buy it, especially now that they're acquired by Match Group, which is this big, huge, monster Frankenstein company, so I just... My question is, how do you build customer loyalty? Right? It's by building brilliant experiences. Right? So, what does loyalty look like in this industry? How is loyalty fostered in an app like this?   [0:19:38] Taylor Gibb: Oh, definitely, and it's funny too because we've got these preferences, but more and more, it's preferences within this Match monopoly. Right? I like OkCupid. I like Hinge. Match says, “That's great. It's all under us. Come on in.” Yeah, fostering loyalty, and then also, there is somewhat distressingly now this price put on things like a super like, or a boost. It's like, not only do I like you, Jordan, but I'm willing to pay an extra $2.00 to show you how much I like you.   [0:20:06] Jordan: Listen, that was before my time. That didn't exist back in the day.   [0:20:12] Taylor Gibb: Do you think Tristan would've dropped a couple of bucks to say hi to you?   [0:20:14] PJ Bruno: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Taylor Gibb: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Jordan: I think he did pay to be anonymous, so you couldn't see how often he looked at someone's profile. I didn't know that existed, so there might be some people out there that knew I was heavily stalking them.   [0:20:25] Taylor Gibb: They're like, “Rockjock?”   [0:20:27] Jordan: Oh, my gosh.   [0:20:27] Taylor Gibb: Didn't you view my profile 20 times?   [0:20:27] Jordan: Okay. This is getting too real. No, but to answer your question, PJ, this is something I actually thought a lot about. As a customer success team, we were doing some workshops, just trying to think about the user lifecycle across different verticals, and we were doing data apps at one point, and this is something that I think is so critical to think of as a marketer, but also as a person, is that it can be an exhilarating experience. I got in at a really good time, I found my person, I got out. It was great. It can be an incredibly lonely experience, especially if you're somebody who is putting yourself out there and being vulnerable, and maybe not getting the number of people interested in you that you'd hoped for, or the quality of people that you'd hoped for. I think that it's imperative that these companies remember that their relationship is with the person using their app, in that when you're the person that's bestowing all these amazing compliments, you can also be incredibly silent unintentionally, and so something that I like to think about is today is Valentine's Day. This can be a really tough day for some people, so use what you have. You have the ability to talk to them. Talk to them and remind them how many people swiped on them in the last year, how many people liked their photo, or how many people did they end up getting to see to build their community, things that you're in control of that aren't necessarily how hot did people think you are, or how many people wanted to go on a date that you said no to, weirdly, vanity metrics. Use what you have at your disposal-   [0:21:53] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:21:53] Taylor Gibb: Literally.   [0:21:53] Jordan: ... And truly build a relationship that you can, which can be either the comforter or the cheerleader, or both.   [0:22:00] PJ Bruno: So, so well said, Jordan. I love that message to everyone out there. You know, we're in the world of automation, and it's going to make our lives continually easier and easier, but let's not forget, along the way somewhere, we can lose something as well. So, on Valentine's Day, reach out to those loved ones, even if it's over the phone. Try to-   [0:22:19] Taylor Gibb: Even if it's in a push notification.   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: Even if it's in a push notification that's triggered in realtime or near realtime. Who's to say?   [0:22:25] Jordan: Be good to yourself, too. I think it's a love day. Love can be everything, but love should also point right back at you.   [0:22:32] Taylor Gibb: Well, I can't-   [0:22:33] Jordan: Getting sentimental there.   [0:22:34] Taylor Gibb: That's good. It's Valentine's Day. It's the day to be sappy, and quite honestly, we can end it on that note.   [0:22:41] PJ Bruno: I'd love to end it on that note. This has been beautiful, you guys. Happy Valentine's Day to you both-   [0:22:46] Taylor Gibb: [crosstalk] Happy Valentine's Day.   [0:22:49] PJ Bruno: ... And happy Valentine's Day to all you out there.   [0:22:50] Taylor Gibb: All you listeners out there.   [0:22:52] PJ Bruno: This is PJ Bruno-   [0:22:53] Taylor Gibb: Taylor Gibb.   [0:22:54] Jordan: And I'm Jordan.   [0:22:56] PJ Bruno: Thanks a lot for coming with us, guys, and take care. [0:22:58]

PJ Bruno sits down with Enterprise AE Patrick Forquer and VP of Growth Spencer Burke to discuss online grocery shopping, Reddit raising a huge Series D round with a near $3 billion valuation, and Warby Parker's new augmented reality shopping tool.          TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] P.J: Hi everyone and welcome to Braze for Impact. Your weekly tech industry discuss digest. So this is a place where we get together each week and just talk about what's happening in tech. This week I'm lucky to have with me my pal Patrick Forquer who is on the sales organization here at Braze. Next week we'll hear from someone from a different department, probably Customer Success, something like that and then the following week maybe someone from product and then so on and so forth. So we can get multiple different angles at what's happening in the tech industry. Like I said today, I'm lucky to have Patrick Forquer and also Spencer Burke. I'll have them introduce themselves.   [0:00:51] Patrick: Hey, I'm Patrick [inaudible]. I'm a strategic account exec here at Braze.   [0:00:55] Spencer: Thanks PJ. I'm Spencer Burke, the VP of growth.   [0:00:58] P.J: How are you guys doing? How's the week trucking on?   [0:01:01] Patrick: It's going okay. No, it's going great. It's great to be here with you P.J. Looking great in your Heather Gray shirt and as always.   [0:01:09] P.J: It's a good color. Spence, how are we doing?   [0:01:11] Spencer: Going well. Got a ski trip planned for this weekend driving up to Vermont, so can't complain.   [0:01:16] P.J: Always at the skiing Spencer Burke.   [0:01:19] Spencer: It's a winter. I got to get it in.   [0:01:20] P.J: Got to get it in guys. You know what, without further ado, why don't we jump on to what's happening this week? This first article, 'Why people still don't buy groceries online'. This is a very interesting thing to me. Actually, let me set up the story because I think they did a really good way of setting this up in the article. Nearly 30 years ago when just 15% of Americans had a computer and even fewer had Internet access, Thomas Parkinson set up a rack of modems on a crate and barrel wine rack and started accepting orders for the Internet's first grocery delivery company, Peapod, which he founded with his brother Andrew. Back then, ordering groceries online was complicated. Most customers had dial-up still and Peapod's web graphics were so rudimentary that customers couldn't even see image of what images of what they were buying. Delivery was complicated too. So the Parkinson's drove to grocery stores in the Chicago area. They actually did this and bought what customers had ordered and then delivered the goods from the backseat of their beat up Honda Civic. When people wanted to stock up on certain goods, strawberry yogurt or bottles of diet coke, the Parkinson's would deplete whole sections of grocery stores. This is, this is wild. I mean it's interesting because we were all constantly talking about convenience and delivery of all sorts of things. Why not groceries? What's the deal?   [0:02:41] Patrick: Yeah. So when I was reading this article, the first thing that came to mind was if, if we rewind 10 years from today and we took a poll of everyone at braise about, which would be more successful grocery delivery or an app on your phone where you tap on one button and a stranger in a Honda Civic pulls up and drives you somewhere. I think we all would have bet on the grocery delivery piece of that. Right?   [0:03:07] Spencer: Every time.   [0:03:08] Patrick: So it is crazy to me and the numbers are super low. I mean 3% of people getting grocery delivery. Spencer, what was your initial take?   [0:03:18] Spencer: I'm curious, have you guys used the grocery delivery service?   [0:03:22] Patrick: So I have, I had a really bad experience actually, so I haven't done it since. And I think that's part of the challenge in this article where-   [0:03:31] Spencer: Can you get into that bad experience or is that...   [0:03:35] Patrick: So we tried to use the grocery ordering off of Amazon Alexa and my wife ordered paper towels and-   [0:03:46] Spencer: Just paper towels?   [0:03:47] Patrick: Yes. And a couple of other things, but I kid you not, they delivered us what must have been the majority of the warehouses paper towels to the point where-   [0:03:58] P.J: Jesus!   [0:03:59] Patrick: ...for two and a half years, we were using paper towels off of that one order. So obviously that's an outlier. But yeah.   [0:04:08] P.J: It seems like it's also, apparently America is really not adopting it as much as other countries like it seems like in Europe. Also in Asia it's like up to 20% or something like that of consumers are using online and it's only 3% here in America. Does that speak to anything that we're doing or what do you guys think?   [0:04:27] Spencer: Well, I mean I think part of it is most people... Most people have cars. Most people live in an area where they have some kind of large grocery store chain and so if you're driving to work, stopping at the grocery store on the way home, it's not changing the convenience kind of function for everyone in the same way that like Lyft or Postmates or Seamless might for your average consumer. Personally, I've tried it here in New York. I recently moved to somewhere that just doesn't have as many large stores as close to me. I just thought, sure, why not? Let's try Amazon Prime. Amazon just bought whole foods recently and let's see how it goes. I think there's a lot of challenges with it. You don't see exactly what you're getting. If something's out of stock, you're relying on them making replacement or not providing it at all. So, if you're planning on using one of these services to plan a dinner you might not actually be able to cook what you intended to or you might not be able to put that meal together because the delivery service wasn't 100% versus if you're in the store, you can kind of course correct as you go.   [0:05:32] P.J: Right. I feel like a lot of us order all sorts of things through the Internet. I'm sure that list goes on, but as far as grocery shopping something that...it's ordering Seamless as one thing, right? It's prepared and sent right over to you as opposed to groceries. People probably a little concerned like you want to feel your fruit, you want to see your meat, you got all these things. I feel like there's a little fear around that probably. For me anyways.   [0:05:59] Patrick: Well definitely. And then you know, they talk about the challenges that these companies have. It's a lot more complex and it would look to me that on the surface with things like some items you have to keep warm. Some items you have to keep cool, you have to do it all really quickly. And so the people put, you know, preparing the packaging, have to know where everything is and then there's delivery and it's mostly in urban areas. So then there's parking challenges and all these things that I didn't necessarily.   [0:06:25] P.J: There's tons of complications that go along with it. Apparently surveys have shown that shoppers are still concerned that they're being charged higher prices when it comes to online delivery and also complain about delivery drivers being late. Those are the two biggest complaints apparently.   [0:06:39] Patrick: Yeah. And the last thing I noticed was in the second article that we were looking at on grocery delivery, there's the casual drop of Google in partnership with Bain, with Bain commissioned a research study, which as we know working in tech means that Google paid Bain to run this survey for them likely with a hypothesis that grocery delivery was about to explode.   [0:07:03] P.J: I feel like they had an a hypothesis in mind. Yes. Something tells me, yeah.   [0:07:07] Spencer: So I don't know if this was entirely altruistic on behalf of a like, yeah, let's do it. Let's go for it. We'd like you guys.   [0:07:13] Patrick: And you know, I noticed Walmart recently pulled their products from Google Express, which is Google's grocery delivery service. So I think there's increasing competition around this for an incredibly small market at the moment. And I guess we'll see where it goes.   [0:07:31] Spencer: Yeah. Before we move on. I, despite our skepticism, I think there clearly is something here and you know, whether it's Instacart or Postmates or Amazon or anything Walmart or Jet tries to do, there's clearly value to having a hall. You're grocery shopping, just show up at your door essentially. And I think like a lot of things on the Internet, whether it was a couple of years ago when everyone's like no one's going to put their credit card into their phone to buy something online. It's like there's all these articles about how many people abandon their carts because it's on mobile and they need to go back to their desktop. No one talks about that anymore. You just do it. I think we're not that far from whole foods being a warehouse of food for Amazon delivery rather than a grocery store. Right.   [0:08:18] Patrick: Delivered by robots.   [0:08:20] Spencer: Yeah, exactly.   [0:08:21] P.J: And that's what the future looks like. Groceries delivered by robots.   [0:08:24] Spencer: You heard it here first.   [0:08:25] P.J: Yeah, we'll leave it to you guys. Next article of the day. Reddit is raising a huge round near $3 billion valuation. So Reddit is raising one. Sorry, $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running. Multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant, Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. And now depending on how much follow on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors and beyond, it's post money valuation could reach an epic $3 billion. Yikes. And now my first concern that comes up immediately for this, and I feel like maybe you guys felt the same way. Censorship, right? I mean, maybe it doesn't matter, but Reddit remains a relatively safe space for trailers and conspiracy theorists alike. The currently banned apps and websites in China though, like massive lists just to shortlist as Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Insta, Youtube, flickr, Tinder, and Reddit of course. And that doesn't even include news publications, cloud storage products and email. So I don't know, there's something feels weird about this, right? Also like Tencent is also one of the most important architects of the great firewall of China. This is serious. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of meat here.   [0:09:53] Spencer: It's like this is a different than I expected.   [0:09:54] P.J: Oh really? It just seems like there's strange things at play.   [0:10:00] Patrick: Spencer, I know you had some hot takes on this.   [0:10:02] Spencer: No, go ahead.   [0:10:03] Patrick: Well, yeah, I think it's interesting that Reddit has had a lot of challenges over the past couple of years. And PJ, you alluded to some of that where they've had some really bad homophobic, misogynistic, racist, threads that have propagated conspiracy theories and hate speech and they've dealt with it in different ways. Some of the ways that they've dealt with it has been good. Some of it's been not so good. I know their CEO was editing comments and specific threads to make them look a certain way. And then he got caught doing that and had to apologize. If they had been a bigger company, can you imagine if Facebook did something like that? He'd be hauled in front of Congress immediately. So, and I was thinking about the valuation piece of this too, where if you took all the bad stuff out, and you're looking at their monetization model, it's through ads, right? Like most companies. They're like most social companies but they've really only recently started monetizing through ads and their real strength has been a very supportive and loyal community of Reddit users. I don't use Reddit, but I know people who do and the people that use Reddit, love Reddit. They love it. They're like in the community, they're posting and commenting and all that stuff. And the challenge as we know scaling a business model where ads are the primary revenue driver is that you can lose some of that early days, communal feel when you start layering in promoted posts and different types of advertisements and it kind of loses its initial bespoke early day feeling those.   [0:11:54] Spencer: Yeah. I think the flip side of the darker elements of Reddit is that Reddit, can be a place for really specific groups of people and that can be people in a city, someone with a certain medical condition, people who play a sport. Like recently I've been looking and there's a subreddit for woodworking and it's like, oh, this is maybe a hobby that I'd be interested in. And there's just a ton of resources and people who are helpful. So for everyone who's out there trying to make a joke, well, if there's a lot more of these people, but for everyone out there who's, who's kind of trolling and you're trying to be a little bit silly, there's a lot of people who are just passionate about something and go to Reddit to share it. And I think it's kind of inspiring actually, that those communities exist on the Internet in a place that it's not just a website for those people. It's a website that can serve any community and it happens to be Reddit for a lot of people.   [0:12:50] Patrick: Right? Do you think that this changes anything for Reddit potentially down the road?   [0:12:58] Spencer: Well, they stay in business for a little bit longer. I don't think so. I think you're probably reading too much into the the Chinese[crosstalk]   [0:13:07] Patrick: have you been spending some time on Reddit recently PJ?   [0:13:09] P.J: Actually, I've only been on Reddit maybe once in my whole life. I'm not a big ... My roommate is like obsessed. Anytime we're doing anything like watching a movie, he just is looking at his phone the whole time and he's in Reddit constantly living in the comments. Right?   [0:13:23] Patrick: Nba Reddit as a really good, yeah. Community. Right. Community.   [0:13:27] Spencer: I feel singled out now because I actually do spend a decent amount of time on Reddit   [0:13:32] Patrick: That's all we need to hear from somebody.   [0:13:32] Spencer: Don't use Facebook, don't use Twitter. Casually though love reading Reddit. The comments can be hilarious. But like I said, just moved recently. So looking for cool areas, restaurants, bars in my neighborhood and there's a subreddit for it. So just reading through it on a couple of times a week can pick out spots, find somewhere to go check out, and it's actually really interesting to see and it's like having a good neighbor or a friend recommend some places to you. You just there and it's a different feel than just going on Yelp and looking at aggregate and total summation.   [0:14:08] Patrick: Are you getting into woodworking? Is that what this is?   [0:14:11] P.J: Yeah. What do you, tell me more about that.   [0:14:13] Spencer: I won't go down the rabbit hole of the hobbies that Reddit has inspired or there's some really, I'll just ... There's some really specifics. I'll read it. That's all. That's all I'll say.   [0:14:23] Patrick: I mean, but what you're describing though, Spencer, is the kind of dual nature of all of these social media sites. On one hand, they can connect people who feel lonely or who are passionate about a certain topic that maybe others around them aren't passionate about and find that community that they'd been looking for. On the other hand, there's Jonses with hate speech and things like that and who knows, maybe Reddit Will start handling this really well and it'd be a success story, so I'll be interested to what they do with all this capital and it's a huge inflection point for their business and kind of their all or nothing shot I feel like so.   [0:15:00] Spencer: Just as an example, they're on the weeds podcast of ox podcasts. They're talking about a study of where they paid people to give up Facebook who are on the platform. They weren't planning to give it up. And those people who are basically just happier, they socialize more, they watch a little more TV, which is maybe the one question one thing.   [0:15:19] Patrick: And they have some money now, which is nice.   [0:15:22] Spencer: But they were less politically divisive. They were a little less informed on some things, but just like genuinely happier. I think one of the interesting things that happens in Reddit versus Facebook, that the communities are moderated by people from the community. So there are subreddits to help people quit smoking, to quit drinking. And when those people will talk about their success, there's so much positive in encouragement and positive feedback and the negative elements of that. Unlike Facebook where anyone from high school that you don't really know anymore can come in and comment and make you feel pretty bad about something or give you that kind of fomo feeling. There's a community of people supporting you trying to do whatever it is. Whether it's something you know, trying to get rid of some addiction or learn some new hobby, which I think so that moderating the fact is it makes it a little bit different than other types of social networks.   [0:16:14] P.J: A little more like true democracy going on over there.   [0:16:18] Spencer: Or a benevolent dictatorship. In the case of moderation.   [0:16:22] Patrick: If Reddit is the front page of the Internet, does that make Facebook like the national enquirer? Who's to say, hi,   [0:16:33] P.J: Let's move on. We got a little of time left. Last article of the day. Warby Parker's new shopping tool lets you try on and buy glasses virtually using your iPhone's camera. So now this article is Warby Parker announced new shopping tool and it's more convenient for iPhone owners, Virtual Try-on. The tool, which lives inside the glasses by mail companies app is available on February 4th. So this Monday it just launched. The caveat is you'll need an iPhone X, iPhone XR or iPhone XS to take advantage. So not just for iPhone users. If you have an old school iPhone, you're not going to be able to use this thing either. Spencer, you wear glasses sometimes, right?   [0:17:13] Spencer: Yep. You got me.   [0:17:15] P.J: You guys can't see. But sometimes he wears glasses. Do you have feelings on this? Do you get ex ... Does this get you excited?   [0:17:22] Spencer: [inaudible]radio? Yeah. Not really. I'm pretty straight forward. When I went to go buy my most recent pair of glasses, went to a store in New York, asked the guy for some help. He picked out two pairs, tried them on, chose one, locked out. And I might be an anomaly there, but I think from-   [0:17:41] P.J: Boom! I love that.   [0:17:42] Spencer: But I think this is really interesting to me because it sort of solves two problems. One is it's helping people try glasses. It's lowering friction to make a purchase. The second is it's giving people a better sense of what they're going to look like without going in the store. So it's going to reduce the likelihood that they need to go in and make a return or [inaudible] me back in, which of course has a cost to Warby. So hopefully for for them the business outcome is it's increasing revenue, making the purchase easier and they're reducing their operating costs by reducing the number of returns.   [0:18:16] Patrick: Yeah. To me, reading the article and there was a lot of buzz about this. This story appeared multiple of the new sources that I read on a regular basis and while it's cool and definitely the benefits that Spencer's talking about are real. I also didn't understand necessarily the getting as much buzz as it did because to me it just feels like they took Snapchat filters and turn them into [crosstalk] Whoa, we can do now what Snapchat could do two years ago and it's just Warby Parker glasses instead of like Elton John glasses. I mean it's cool, but I want the Elton John one.   [0:18:55] Spencer: Yeah.   [0:18:56] Patrick: So it's just definitely cool and I think there's obviously a business case to be made from a technology perspective. It wasn't super exciting. I think there's other use cases for AR for things like the way that Wayfair and other furniture stores are doing it where you can see, you can overlay a couch in a living room type of thing that would be more valuable than, productize smart Snapchat filter.   [0:19:21] Spencer: So you don't wear glasses do you?   [0:19:22] Patrick: I do not.   [0:19:29] P.J: 20-20 vision. I honestly just don't trust that augmented reality fit. I don't think it'll necessarily match real life. And I guess it's for two reasons. One, I just don't trust that just looking at yourself with this augmented pair of glasses on will necessarily look the way to look in real life. Also, we're not even considering the feel. the feel of a pair of glasses has to feel right. You know, so until they have augmented feeling technology out, I'm not buying.   [0:19:57] Patrick: Well, the other thing I was thinking about too, along those lines, PJ is 97% of Americans won't freaking order groceries, but there's going to be some huge wave of people putting something on their face every day that they saw on an app.   [0:20:11] P.J: That's what I'm talking about.   [0:20:13] Patrick: Hot tech Spencer. I don't know.   [0:20:14] P.J: There it is. It's called augmented reality. It's inherently different. It's like if you think about catching a charter as art in Pokemon go is so different from trying to catch on in real life. Have you ever tried, it's entirely different. Wait, one more question for you guys. What I want to hear, what's an augmented reality app that you're just hankering for that you just really want? And I'll give you a second to think. Well, I'll tell you mine and you know, growing up I was very into a Tamagotchi if you guys remember those little pet on your key chain, but just like a cool little Tamagotchi that only I can see my pet. No one can see them. I look around where is he? Okay. There he is on the ground. You've got to feed them. You got to take care of them. And then you know when it comes to having to really take care of him, like you just close the app, close the phone. I don't need to worry about buying pet food or any of that stuff. Something that makes me feel like I have a little buddy.   [0:21:08] Patrick: So an AR Tamagotchi   [0:21:09] P.J: An AR Tamagotchi you heard it here first.   [0:21:12] Patrick: Wow. Here's all my money. [inaudible]   [0:21:17] Spencer: You don't use Reddit. You don't order groceries online, you don't think that trying glasses on with your phone is a good idea. But they are Tamagotchi.   [0:21:26] P.J: I am on Facebook so you can find just about out of time here. You guys, thanks so much for being on here with me. This is PJ Bruno.   [0:21:35] Patrick: Patrick [inaudible]   [0:21:36] Spencer: And Spencer Burke.   [0:21:37] P.J: signing off. You guys take care. [0:21:39]