Ben Fisher

You can sort of think of it as, at the time Yammer had just started, it was sort of like a Google group meets LinkedIn, where what we would do was once a week we'd email everyone in the organization saying, hey, if you had one ask, if there was one thing you could ask the entire company for, what would that be?

And our software was just an email that came the same time every week, and it aggregated everyone's requests and then sent out a single email the next day that showed what everyone needed.

It automatically incorporated their LinkedIn information so that people would have a social context of who was making the request.

And then if you could help someone, you could just respond in line in the email, and your response was routed just to them so there was no reply at all.

Okay, and so how do you guys make money?

How do people pay Alchemy?

It was a SaaS subscription.

So professional organizations.

YEC was one of our earliest customers.

Co-working spaces like WeWork, they were an early customer.

Early on, it was...

So quite frankly, it originated in the labs.

We work labs and this is back when, before we work was even big.

So I'm not even, I think we had a letter of intent from them, but we ultimately didn't even charge them.

They co-working spaces ended up not even being our target market.

Eventually, uh, we were charging at the bottom line.

We started like a hundred bucks a month.

Um, the, the comparison that we would often see was, you know, was like Salesforce would charge like five to $10 per user per month.

We never got to a point where it was real that we could, uh,

that we would be able to quite frankly, we never found anyone.