SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

677: Talkdesk Passes 50,000 Seats, $25M Raised To Be Your More Efficient Call Center with COO Gadi Shamia

01 Jun 2017

22 min

4380 words

2 speakers

01 Jun 2017

Audio

Description

Gadi Shamia. He's the chief operating officer at Talkdesk, the world's leading call center software platform. It's backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures and Salesforce Venture. Talkdesk has grown 8x over the past 2 years and has over 250 employees along with their thousand customers including Box, Shopify, Dropbox and Weather.com. Prior to Talkdesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates $5M in global business. He was also a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at ReachLocal. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Innovator's Dilemma What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Gadi wished he knew that he would be fine so that he could stress less about it Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 – Nathan introduces Gadi to the show 01:26 – EchoSign was acquired by Adobe 01:31 – TopManage was acquired by SAP 01:53 – Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution 01:58 – It is fully-integrated 02:26 – Talkdesk charges users per license fee 02:44 – Talkdesk is a SaaS company 02:54 – Average pay per customer varies 03:01 – A company with 50 users would pay $5K-7K a month 03:28 – Per seat cost is around $65-125 depending on the subscription 04:02 – Gadi joined Talkdesk 3 years ago 04:16 – The call center space is an interesting market 04:22 – It is still dominated by all players such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesis 04:35 – Talkdesk already has a proven product 04:41 – Talkdesk has a couple of hundred customers who like the product and has been using Talkdesk for years 04:53 – Tiago, Talkdesk's CEO, was one of the reason Gadi joined Talkdesk 05:14 – Tiago is the co-founder and his co-founder left Talkdesk after 4 and a half years 05:50 – Gadi believes that co-founders leave because they might not feel as excited as they were in the early stages 06:01 – Co-founders staying is also devastating for the company 06:10 – When a co-founder can say that he's leaving and he has done his job, it's a healthy company 06:44 – Talkdesk has broken the million ARR 06:57 – Talkdesk had 50 people when Gadi came in 07:17 – Tiago was the only salesperson at Talkdesk when he started it and he was able to get remarkable brands to use Talkdesk 07:43 – Gadi met Tiago through Gadi's friend from Storm Ventures 08:06 – Gadi and Tiago met in 2014 several times 08:38 – Talkdesk currently has 1200 customers 08:48 – There are around 50K seats 09:06 – Average MRR 09:43 – Alot of Talkdesk customers are e-commerce customers and they are seasonal 10:32 – Talkdesk is at a net negative churn 11:00 – Talkdesk talks to their customers about their seasonal needs and adjusts the annual licensing fee 11:42 – Talkdesk respects Workday, Salesforce and works with ServiceNow 12:48 – The best companies will get 110-120 in aiming net revenue expansion 13:03 – Most companies that have worked with Talkdesk benefit from it and grow 13:10 – DoorDash grew from 40 seats to 800 13:38 – Talkdesk currently has a team of 250 people 14:40 – Talkdesk's growth is mostly from new sign-ups 14:56 – Talkdesk has raised a total of $24.5M 15:01 – The last round was in 2015 15:15 – Talkdesk is neither raising rounds or talking to Salesforce 15:34 – Talkdesk focuses on building a real business 16:24 – Talkdesk is still burning cash 16:53 – Most of Talkdesk's customers pay annually upfront 18:13 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: When a cofounder leaves, it means he's done his job and the company is healthy Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth. Building a real business is about the service you provide your customers in helping them achieve growth. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where people are clicking and scrolling on the website Organifi – The juice was Nathan's life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Freshbooks – Nathan doesn't waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Chapters

1. What makes Talkdesk a leading call center software? 2. How has Talkdesk grown in the past few years? 3. What is the business model of Talkdesk? 4. Why did Gadi Shamia join Talkdesk? 5. How does Talkdesk manage seasonal customer needs? 6. What are the challenges of customer churn for Talkdesk? 7. How much funding has Talkdesk raised and how is it utilized? 8. What advice does Gadi have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Featured

Nathan Latka

Gadi Shamia

Transcription

Chapter 1: What makes Talkdesk a leading call center software?

0.031 - 21.207 Nathan Latka

This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.

Chapter 2: How has Talkdesk grown in the past few years?

21.227 - 35.722 Nathan Latka

We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 677. Coming up tomorrow morning, I talk to Alessandro. If you're creative who needs work, you don't want to miss this.

Chapter 3: What is the business model of Talkdesk?

36.303 - 56.567 Nathan Latka

She launched Zupa with $8 million raised and $4 million plus in creative projects that they've processed. Good morning, everybody. My guest this morning is Gadi Shamia. He's the chief operating officer at a company called TalkDesk, the world's leading call center software platform. It's backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.

Chapter 4: Why did Gadi Shamia join Talkdesk?

56.888 - 79.282 Nathan Latka

TalkDesk grew eight times during, or 8X, sorry, over the past two years and has over 250 employees, along with 1,000 customers, including Box, Shopify, Dropbox, and Weather.com. Prior to TalkDesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates 5G $500 million in global business and was a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at Reach Local.

79.302 - 82.768 Nathan Latka

Gadi, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely.

Chapter 5: How does Talkdesk manage seasonal customer needs?

82.989 - 90.163 Nathan Latka

Was that SAP company EchoSign by chance? No, EchoSign was acquired by Adobe. Ah, got it. What was the one that went to SAP?

90.751 - 95.877 Gadi Shamia

The company name was TopManage and the product that SAP sells today is called SAP Business One.

Chapter 6: What are the challenges of customer churn for Talkdesk?

96.398 - 102.786 Nathan Latka

Very cool. Okay, so you're in a unique spot at TalkDesk. So you're chief operating officer. They were founded in 2011. I think you joined in 2015.

Chapter 7: How much funding has Talkdesk raised and how is it utilized?

102.906 - 103.667 Nathan Latka

Is that right?

104.448 - 106.07 Gadi Shamia

Yeah, I joined a little over two years ago.

106.33 - 111.797 Nathan Latka

Okay, so I want to get into kind of how you came into the business. But first, tell us what TalkDesk does and what's the business model? How do you make money?

Chapter 8: What advice does Gadi have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

112.773 - 141.21 Gadi Shamia

So TalkDesk is a cloud-based, actually born a cloud call center solution. So it's fully integrated with voice, SMS, and agent management call center solutions. So companies can literally log in and within minutes or days have a fully operational call center that can power companies with 5, 10 employees or companies with hundreds and hundreds of agents serving customers 24 hours a day.

141.477 - 142.399 Nathan Latka

And what's the business model?

142.419 - 161.335 Gadi Shamia

How do you make money? We, like many other enterprise software companies, we charge users for license fees, and we also charge for telephone companies. So the advantage of TalkTest is you have one vendor that provides both the software and telephone and SMS services. You have one bill and one company to work with.

162.017 - 163.84 Nathan Latka

So is this, I mean, is this a SaaS company?

164.765 - 166.607 Gadi Shamia

Yes, it's absolutely a SaaS company.

166.627 - 174.516 Nathan Latka

And so I want to avoid going into every like individual customer cohort you guys are working with, but on average, what's the average business paying you guys per month?

177.78 - 188.453 Gadi Shamia

It's really dependent all over the place. So a company would say 50 users who pay, let's say $5,000 a month or $7,000 a month for the service.

189.814 - 193.759 Nathan Latka

So again, give me an average just so we can get a sense of like your average customer fit.

194.768 - 203.359 Gadi Shamia

I don't have an average though on my head. So we have customers with three users and we have customers with 850 users. So it's really hard to average them out.

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

677: Talkdesk Passes 50,000 Seats, $25M Raised To Be Your More Efficient Call Center with COO Gadi Shamia

Chapter 1: What makes Talkdesk a leading call center software?

Chapter 2: How has Talkdesk grown in the past few years?

Chapter 3: What is the business model of Talkdesk?

Chapter 4: Why did Gadi Shamia join Talkdesk?

Chapter 5: How does Talkdesk manage seasonal customer needs?

Chapter 6: What are the challenges of customer churn for Talkdesk?

Chapter 7: How much funding has Talkdesk raised and how is it utilized?

Chapter 8: What advice does Gadi have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

677: Talkdesk Passes 50,000 Seats, $25M Raised To Be Your More Efficient Call Center with COO Gadi Shamia

Chapter 1: What makes Talkdesk a leading call center software?

Chapter 2: How has Talkdesk grown in the past few years?

Chapter 3: What is the business model of Talkdesk?

Chapter 4: Why did Gadi Shamia join Talkdesk?

Chapter 5: How does Talkdesk manage seasonal customer needs?

Chapter 6: What are the challenges of customer churn for Talkdesk?

Chapter 7: How much funding has Talkdesk raised and how is it utilized?

Chapter 8: What advice does Gadi have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

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