Todd Olson

In the early days of the company, I picked up the phone every single time a customer emailed me, every time.

I managed Zendesk Q myself.

amongst other things.

If I saw someone doing something, I jumped on the phone, I resolved it.

And that set the culture that we just don't let customers fail silently and tend to send four emails back and forth replicating their solution, sending me screenshots.

That is incredible waste and inefficient.

And that kind of maniacal customer success ended up evolving to one of our core values and is now part of our culture where

you know and look it's i'll admit it's much harder at our size and scale now to provide that level of support but we that is what we aspire to to have that same level of support when we were tiny when i was personally doing folks i still am in the zendesk queue and actually even this morning i was communicating with my vp of support we're like looking at doing a a sprint to burn down our backlog and

I volunteered to go into the tickets and burn down the backlog with our support team.

I haven't done that in a little while, so that's honestly a little scary, but I will probably learn something if I go spend four or five hours just obsessing over why are people sending messages to support and why do we have so many tickets?

I'll probably learn something that will benefit the company in many, many other ways.

And this led to our funding.

Our first round, like, no one had heard of us.

We were in Raleigh, North Carolina.

It wasn't the hotbed of, you know, at the time, unicorn startups.

And we heard about it because an investor, Battery, was here in Austin, and they were meeting with a local company, and the CEO, they asked the CEO, who's the interesting company that you use?

And this Pinto thing is, like, pretty good, and they've got great support, and, you know, I like the people.

And sure enough, they reached out, and that led to this financing, which really sort of broke us away and started driving a lot of our growth.

The other things we've done since the very early days is obsessed over Net Promoter Score.

And some of you may have different opinions about this.