Ravi Gupta
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ravi Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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How does he describe to them what's going on and why it's going to be durable and why it's okay? There's just all these hidden costs that go in and they all prevent percentage of time you are focused on delivering a resolution to your customer. And if we envision there's this incredible advantage right now
That's pronounced and even more pronounced than it's probably ever been of just people that spend time thinking about what their customer wants and how to deliver it to them in the best, fastest, cheapest way. And I think that moments that you get to free up your brain to think about that are the moments that are going to deliver value for your company.
So maybe going back to your question of like, how would I think about the biggest value creation lever for a company if you were like dropped in as the leader? It'd be like, what percentage of time does the senior leadership team think about how to deliver value to the customer in the best, fastest, and cheapest way in six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months?
The lower that percentage is, the more that there's opportunity for that. There's a massive hidden cost right now.
I'll give you a couple of examples that come to mind. I'll give you one that's inside of our portfolio and one that I work with closely and one that I don't. Bill McDermott famously, when he took over as CEO of ServiceNow, talked about the number of customer meetings he had in his first 90 days.
And it was some number that effectively equated to like 10 per day, 10 customer meetings per day, including weekends. I think he said he met a thousand customers in the first quarter. That is baffling. ServiceNow is a huge company. He has all these things that he has to do.
If what he's saying is true, which I presume it is because he's Bill McDermott and he's an amazing CEO, that would make me pretty darn bullish about ServiceNow realizing what their customers want and how to go build it for them because the CEO is so incredibly externally focused. I love this idea. And every company that I am lucky enough to talk to, I tell them like, please be externally focused.
One, it's so much more fun, but it's also so much more impactful to like go and solve customer problems than it is to like deal with internal nonsense. So that's one. And then I do think Sierra is doing a really good job on this dimension too. I think that team is focused on what do customers want? How can we deliver it to them? And how can we embrace AI to the maximum ability?
And I think that means don't do one-off things like have AI help you with it. Anytime you figure something out that can be helped with AI, do it. Tell the whole team. And I think that practically speaking, Patrick, I think that it's almost easier for us to think about the companies that probably aren't. doing this.
And they probably make us have a little bit of a pit in our stomach of like, oh gosh, how's that going to work? What are they going to do then? Are they going to go and change? And I actually think right now being private is a huge advantage, is a general matter.
Because you really have to be courageous to not let something that you've said in the past to a public market investor, not let that stop you from doing things. You know how big of a fan I am of Fiji. Fiji will do whatever is right for Instacart. It doesn't matter if they're private or public.
But there's a lot of people who feel really obligated to their past self and not to do the right thing for the long term. I also think it's not a coincidence that the people that are going to do this well are people that understand customer problems, but then they also understand the technology of what it can do.
I think the anecdotal experience of AI not changing your life is really dangerous right now. Because if you're kind of like, meh, if you want to be contrarian right now and be like, oh, the models, they're not that great. That's fun to say probably at like a cocktail party and it fits with people's anecdotal experiences, but that is dangerous as hell.
go sit with a bunch of people devoting their lives to this and have them tell you about the future. I really believe that that is incredibly valuable.
I actually think that that trope that you mentioned was actually pretty brilliant for a very long time. I suspect it still applies. Can a startup build distribution faster than a big company can build product or build innovation? I actually think it's still the right question.
I think the thing that's probably changed is the speed at which you can build distribution with a great product has probably gone up. The willingness for somebody to adopt something that feels like magic. Maybe that's the point. I think that AI can make your product feel like magic. And I think people are really willing to adopt things that feel like magic.
So the speed that a really well-executing startup that produces magic can get distribution is probably higher than it's ever been, would be my guess. I'm not enough of a student of this to know that for sure, but I do think they are producing magic.
The thing that is actually interesting, though, if you're a startup, just to make it real, is if somebody has distribution already and they thoughtfully deploy AI and they actually go and disrupt themselves and they actually put it into their product, they're even harder to compete with right now.
I think that Microsoft is way harder to compete with now than it's ever been before because they have this ridiculous distribution, insane distribution. And they are really pushing to get AI into their products in a way that feels like magic. I think that no one doubts that Satya Nadella gets this. Nobody wonders about whether they get it.
The only thing that limits their speed is like their organizational size. It's not intestinal fortitude from Satya. I think there are other big companies that you really worry that they actually are not going to be able to get the product in because they're going to let organizational stuff get in their way. I actually think it's still the same question.
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