Adil Saleh: Hey, greetings, everybody. This is hyperengage podcast and your host Adil. And I have my co-host today joined most recently with us, Taylor. And we have a special guest Daniel from
cnvrg.io. Thank you very much Taylor for bearing with me for the next 30 minutes ahead of time, I’m being advanced. And thank you, Daniel, for taking the time today. And, you know, getting up here. Appreciate it.
Daniel Goldfeld: Thank you for having me. It’s great.
Adil Saleh: Okay, so, so a bit about what we’re going to be talking today about, like, we’ll be laser-focused on
converge.io and this person that is setting up some systems working on, on the frameworks working on on the Operations and Technology and what kind of data that is best available for for the customers as well, since I know that you’re one of the leading in the space, when it comes to building machine learning frameworks from starting from a, you know, documentation to deployment, you’re working hands-on with your customer. So why don’t we start with Daniel you tell us a little bit about how you started this. You know, yourself in the Customer Success space? And why converge?
Daniel GoldfeldDefinitely, yeah, so I’ve actually, that may be an unusual path, I’ve started as you know, from the not from the customer-facing roles, but actually, the technical roles being the creation and testing engineer, for a big company in the surveillance space, actually, military surveillance, then I moved to smaller startups, this was much funner. And more interesting, did some product management and project management. And then I realized that I’m doing a lot of talking to customers, right in order to understand the needs in order to understand if there’s a streamline if we’re managing to streamline, you know, the roadmap and what we’re planning to do within the product with other customers needs, do we have a market feeds. So all of those brought me to understand that I like to be close to the customer. And then I started looking for ways to do it. And this is where customer success started blooming. And it just felt like the right position and the right exactly the right fit for what I wanted to do. Basically connecting the business the needs the company needs with the customer needs, understanding the market fit for each one of the customers being proactive, and trying to create success for both the company and the customers or potential customers.
Taylor Kenerson: What gave you the confidence to do, you know, switch your journey like that and just dive headfirst into doing something completely different?
Daniel Goldfeld: Um, first of all, I am a true believer in doing what you like, right? And what feels right. So I understand there are a lot of constraints. But I think that if you’re doing things that prove that you like doing, enjoy it more than doing things just because you have to. So this was part of the journey. And I guess the second thing is that the transition was very, very easy. Because a lot of product management roles strive to talk to customers, right, it’s super important for them to better understand what customers need from the product, and what they’re lacking. So this shift of not only talking about this but also sort of making this a two-way road, right, we’re not only getting the feedback from the customers but also sort of advocating what the company does, understanding how the new features how the new products fit the needs of this company or may fIt even without them knowing. So just because I’m I have a really close relationship with them. And I understand the user is the power user, the stakeholders. So this was pretty easy to do this transition, maybe focusing less on, you know, the future and the roadmap more than what we have, and more than, you know how we sell it. But still, the core of it seems to be very, very similar.
Taylor Kenerson: It’s really unique that when you get into different spaces, you know, the more that people focus on the product, I feel like the more targets are missed. And then when you kind of go internal or external and start focusing on the people, you begin to, you know, discover and uncover like so many hidden nuggets. It’s incredible.
Daniel Goldfeld: That I completely agree. I think a lot of companies are struggling with it. There’s a lot of companies that are sort of, you know, trying to go ahead and push and believe that they’ll get dominance in the market by just pushing technology, right? We have an idea. We have the technology, we’re going to push it forward, and they’re not giving enough attention in my opinion to the customers, the users. The Market and they hit and miss, they have amazing technology they have an amazing offering. But basically, they’re not, they’re not getting the market share they want to get just because they’re not listening to those customers and don’t you know, they’re not flexible enough in sort of understanding not only what they want to achieve, but what their customers are expecting of them.
Adil Saleh: Absolutely. And also, you know, a lot of cs teams, because we speak with Cs leadership a lot. And a lot of them, we feel that they’re not, over time, they’re not evolving with their customer goals. Like, let’s say, if I purchased or made a transaction on day one, that goes ahead attached to your product may change in six months, or maybe a year. So apart from just focusing more on the technology and product value realization and adoption, they’re not consistently talking to the customers on just the outcomes and the goals that they’re receiving there, apart from just making a transaction every year. So evolution is really necessary for CS individuals or any team that faces the customer. And there’s also one more thing that we’ve noticed, and which is quite notable, and that’s going to help early stage saas, that they’re not, you know, they’re they don’t have a 360 view of their customer activities, right from day one. Whether it’s onboarding, whether it’s adoption stage, whether it’s, it’s some business reviews, and all these mainstream operations, we’ve said, so having eyes on top at all times, is very important to them, for that, you know, two’s take a lot of tools that are dedicated for Customer Success teams come very handy, very, very handy, to empower them with the data. So can you tell us more about what value means to your customers? Let’s say you talk about some, you know, medium-sized customer, and then we talk about enterprise. So what value means, in a very precise way, what do you think, using
converge.io as a business?
Daniel Goldfeld: So I think, first of all, to what you mentioned, I completely agree, I think the lack of the ability to see the 360 and you know, for each customer, or lacking the tools, I think it’s even one step behind that. I think not a lot of companies think they need to do it. Or that this is an important part of their, you know, growth engine, I think a lot of companies are focusing on the new sales, right, getting those customers across the finish line, those sales, those opportunities, but once they’re their customers, suddenly, they get much less attention than while they were an opportunity, right. And that’s fine. On one hand, on the other, you need to keep the relationship because without having this relationship, you won’t understand the value you need to provide, right. And this brings me to your question of what value is, especially with Converge. So value is, is basically the understanding that you’ve saved money, you save time, and basically, you’ve improved your processes, right? If we look at this in a very, very general way, because eventually, every company is interested in you know, being more efficient, and every individual would like to feel more empowered, and that he actually is doing a positive thing. So he brought a good product to the company and be happy, right or to basically, verticals that you need to address. So on the efficiency side is understand that you actually achieve what they want to get. And this is why the relationship between the pre-sale and the post-sale teams is so important because usually the need, the pain point, the understanding of what the customer is actually looking for, will will surface during the pre-sale cycle, right, because afterwards, they’re really good products. And it’s harder to get Okay, remember what you had before you’re using converge, right. And the second vertical is actually empowering the the power users and the sponsors and the stakeholders, the ones that are actually bought the product and value added inside of it, this is a good fit, empower them so that they’ll they’ll be able to present this product as a success right within the company, basically provide them with the tools of showing how efficient it is how this improved their work, how this made their life ease. With converge. Basically, we’re a distributed system or a platform that allows managing resources for data scientists, right. So instead of each and every one of the data scientists managing their own resources and basically doing this in a very inefficient way with a lot of cost attached to it. You’re getting a platform that allows you to basically manage this on one level for for the entire IT team or DevOps team and basically be able to allocate the resources by a click of a button to the relevant data scientists and also sort of have a streamline pipeline of your entire AI and ML ops journey, right. But basically, the value is very similar. Regardless of what you’re selling, the value is basically making sure you’re providing and basically not adding an overhead for your customers and they’re less happy than what they the way they were Before before they bought your product, and that you’re actually able to show the value that you’re bringing by showing that people are more efficient that you save money. Basically, processes are working better or that they have better visibility into what they want to see. Right?
Adil Saleh: It must have a platform for data scientists and you know, office teams did not only not only streamline and centralize everything, but also make things efficient. They go in not like not move in silos, a lot of engineers I’ve seen moving in silos and reading some research papers or tab documents or different platforms figuring out their problems. So if they have everything in one place, a lot of things can be, you know, streamlining does a lot like it’s half of the game like centralizing everything is half of the battle when it comes to building infrastructure. So that’s interesting about your, your own team. Like how big is your team right now?
Daniel Goldfeld: So my team is Seven people. number outsourced team that we’re also outsourcing we’re we’re actually not a lot of people know, but we actually got purchased by Intel. So we’re actually part of Intel.
Adil Saleh: so you were acquired by Intel. Congratulations. Is that? Is that happening for good or bad?
Daniel Goldfeld: It’s good. It’s actually good. Because we’re enjoying both worlds, right? We’re getting our independence, we’re keeping our independent brands. So basically, we’re getting Intel’s backing in regards to funding resources, or projects. So it’s actually a very good thing for us.
Adil Saleh: Oh, cool. Now it makes sense. Now, I can see why they made this acquisition. You know, it definitely relates a lot with the longer term goals Intel has for the next five or 10 years. Oh, that’s that news. That’s new.
Taylor Kenerson: How do you manage? Hold on? How do you manage? You know, those seven people that work? Not I wouldn’t say like, I hate using hierarchical terms. Obviously, they work for you. But we all work together, you know what I mean? The product can’t get done without any of these people. So how do you even manage people, especially today, in today’s times.
Daniel Goldfeld: Converge is a small company, right? We are a small operation, we’re only about 70 to 80 people. So it’s easier to manage such a small team because you’re able to talk to each one, right? So I do have my platforms, I’m looking at adoption, I’m looking at, you know, engagements, I’m looking at renewals, all of that, and everybody we’re doing this. But I think the core of the management of the team is actually fitting the right customer success engineer to the right accounts, right. So basically understanding the strengths of each one of my customer success engineers or customer success managers, and fitting the right accounts for them, I have customer success engineers that are better. They’re working better with the SMB market, or the mid size market, they have those who are more fit to work with enterprises, let’s say from North America, India is different, Israel is completely different. So having the right people in the right portfolios on the right accounts is definitely half, you know, half of it, because it’s a lot of a lot about relationships and understanding the culture.
Adil Saleh: Absolutely. You know, and a lot of, you know, the SAAS businesses that involve technologies, especially in the onboarding time, they need, you know, people with a technical background as well, not just the customer facing background, is that the same case with you guys?
Daniel Goldfeld: Yeah, we are actually even more focused on the technical background. And for us, it’s even harder because the platform itself is more of, you know, IT DevOps team focused, because we’re trying to focus on resource management, more efficient way of allocating resources for data scientists to end their experiments. But because it’s a data science platform, we also need to have the know how in data science, right, which is a completely different. So it’s actually a very, very tricky part, or tricky place where we’re in right now. Because we need to find people that have the technical know how the ability to basically do their customer successful, basically the ability to manage a relationship, but also have at least a little bit of understanding of how data scientists work and what are their pain points and what they’re looking for. So it’s a very, very, very narrow niche, that we’re now trying to sort of, you know, build and find the right people that we’ll be able to do a bit of, of all of it, but it’s definitely a challenge
Adil Saleh: Okay, so on, on an average basis, like, what does your average CSM serves? Like? How how big is that big book of business for small to mid market?
Daniel Goldfeld: So for the enterprise, we’re talking about a few, right, because they’re big accounts with huge companies that are basically by for significant amounts of money, right? So they need to have this probably paying 70 or 60% of their revenue. Exactly. So they need to have this very close handle Thinking and relationship management. So for those, this might be five, six accounts for CSM, right? For the SMEs and the smaller ones. Again, there’s another challenge with converge specifically the fact that we’re also on premise and SaaS, right, we’ve got two offerings, we have the on prem, where there is also installation in the infrastructure involved. And we have saas where basically, you’re just using this and you need to get the value out of that. So for the SAS, it’s a little bit easier, we can have more accounts for each team per CSM, those can be dozens, right? For the on prem, it’s a bit more tricky, because again, there’s a lot of moving parts. So it’s sort of, it’s less of a customer success, more of a technical account manager role, where they are focusing on also the ability to, you know, provide technical, no less relationship management, more of an infrastructure management, monitoring, the ability to basically make sure that the platform is working the way they expect it to work.
Adil Saleh: Of course, so let’s talk about small businesses, you have more than you want to expand and then down the road, and you have one person serving around 10 or 15 accounts. Now, I’m just focused on onboarding to the adoption journey. In your case, it becomes complicated for businesses that not a not a thing, not that a lot. And, you know, you cannot put dedicate a team for them. So what kind of training centers do you have, like training, what platform technologies have you incorporated? And how automated is it like I’m trying to focus more on, you know, how digital how far digital CS is Converge
Daniel Goldfeld: For now, again, being a small company with a small operation, data science is not it’s not such a big domain, right. So our addressable market at this point is not that big, we’re actually expanding, we’re now expanding to sort of provide pre built in tools for developers, which will definitely increase the addressable market, but in our, in our in our stage and what we have to offer and right now, basically, the, the benefit, those are small, those are big deals, but not a lot of right. So each one, each onboarding is pretty long, right? Because we need to, we need to get those stakeholders in line, right. So we need to have the DevOps team involved, IT involved data scientists involved, usually privacy and security. So a lot of moving parts. For us right now, the way to do the onboarding, is basically the dedicated delivery team, which is a different team that sits also in my organization, their job is, and we’re talking about the onboarding, their job is basically to deliver the system and perform the initial training, more focused on the infrastructure portion, right of how to manage the different instances, how to do that. And basically, that’s, that’s the main focus of what they do, once they’re done. And basically, this is the onboarding portion and the training portion, they’re basically handing it over to the CSCs. To maintain the relationship right. For the SaaS it’s a little bit easier, because with the SAS, there is no delivery, there’s just the you know, the initial installation, then basically a training on the platform. This is usually done either by ourselves engineers, even before the deal. So even on the pre-sale cycle. And basically, once they buy, they are already sort of trained on the system, and they’re started working on it, or there is a very lightweight training done by the CSE teams, and there’s also an implementation center that is basically maintained and allows our data scientists to work with, and there’s a lot of engagements with support or support is very, very proactive and knowledgeable. So they’re, they’re acting usually not even a support but more as advocacy and explaining how to use the product. So there’s a good portion of it on the support team as well.
Adil Saleh: 18:50
Great. Great, great. And on the marketing side. I’m sorry, go ahead Taylor.
Taylor Kenerson:
Sorry, go ahead. I was gonna say how do you empower your people to then empower the stakeholders? What does that process look like? What are you like? What frameworks do you use? What like, what nuggets? Do you? How do you do that? Because
Daniel Goldfeld: First of all, there’s a lot of a lot of knowledge sharing within the team. So we use confluence, we use other tools in order to sort of have this internal database and turn it on knowledge base that allows the team to be knowledgeable when they’re talking to customers, right. And if there are new things that we encounter and new requirements, new, you know, nuggets or life hacks, they’re constantly being updated into those internal knowledge base. It’s also a lot of, sort of, you know, an audit test along the way with the dailies that we have or the weeklies that we have, so a lot of people are bringing some of their recent engagement that they have requirements, talks, and basically the team the entire team is talking about it, discussing it and finding creative solutions or ideas of how to address a new requirement or need, that came from the customer?
Taylor Kenerson: What are these dailies and weeklies, they sound so interesting? Are they just touchpoint meetings with different key people a part of the team?
Daniel Goldfeld: So the dailies, the dailies are per team, basically each and every team has a daily where they discuss the outstanding issues or the requirements are meeting is that they’re planning to have some sort of, you know, a touch base with the entire with each one of the teams to understand what are their plans, and if there are any challenges that are facing or things that they require help with. The weeklies are actually for the entire organization. So the entire customer success department, which combine other free themes are the CSC CSCS, the delivery team and the support. And this is where basically, we discuss bigger issues, you know, things that are impacting a big number of customers new features, things that are basically relevant for the entire team. And then this drives the discussion about oh, that’s cool. There’s a use case we can use it for. And then somebody else thinks, Oh, that’s pretty nice. I think we can use this as well. And there’s the ball starts to roll right about, okay, this is interesting this is.
Adil Saleh: So also, on the customer side, are you performing any kind of, you can say process, or any kind of strategies for your customer marketing, like building customer stories or case studies out of all the process that has been recorded by your team, their journeys, and all that. Anything related.
Daniel Goldfeld: In previous companies, yes, and converge honestly, no, because it’s, again, the operation is still too small in order to, you know, have complex processes or tracking, it’s still very family oriented, so we can meet them and discuss those projects. Basically, during the days in the weakness in my previous companies and teams that have managed that were more distributed. And they definitely worked with a lot of different CSM tools in order to be able to track those customers. They’re my customer success engineers, each one of them had about 100 accounts in his portfolio. So this was much bigger than the operation right now. So we had a lot of automations, in order to build the health scores for each one of those accounts, able to plan the, you know, the workweek to understand what are we focusing on this week, because we want to make sure that nobody’s hiding, you know. And then suddenly, we’re going to have an unexpected churn or an unexpected expansion, which basically still means we’re not managing the account the way we should. So yeah, we use a lot of personal tools, a lot of data gathering a lot of automations, and operation, CS operation tools. But those were mainly used in bigger, bigger companies, where each and every one CSMs has had much more accounts to manage.
Adil Saleh: Exactly, and even the companies that are smaller, but they’re managing, or they’re, they’re more focused on small businesses and mid market size businesses, they’re not serving enterprise. Now, there are a lot of marketing tools, a lot of tools in a saturated market, they use a whole bunch of these things. So that’s good. So Daniel, we will shift a little more on how you’re investing like time towards people, like of course, you’re 60 or 70 species, you know, so how are you guys as leaders, you know, working with people on the on the individual level, on the personal level, to help them be a better, better self better professional, you know, better version of themselves. So is there any sort of like, it can be any operation, it’s not something that you have a training center, and you have a knowledge base or Academy of any sorts, it just needs to do or, you know, your team, you touch base once a month, and you just not talk about work, but you just talk about their personal life and what kind of obstacles they have, how they can improve it, and how they can have a better balance.
Daniel Goldfeld: Yeah, so I think, maybe thinking you said that when I was when I was a younger manager, right? Before I started the
Adil Saleh: you’re still young, by the way.
Daniel Goldfeld: My first sort of executive, the first ones, I thought that the way to empower people and basically build a team is by being, you know, doing everything by myself, right, showing everybody sort of leading by example, by by doing everything by myself, and basically trying to harness them and have the team doing what I do, and basically set the same expectations for them as the expectations that I have for myself. It’s partially true. But I think I’ve missed quite a big portion of the ability to empower my people. And I think I’ve learned a lot from it from from people that were coaching me. And the path that I’m taking right now is more of trying to work with people and mostly with the people right instead of meeting the Customers, of course, I’m still the escalation point. And I’m jumping on calls with customers. And I’m trying to know and feel the, you know, what’s going on with, with the market and with what we have to offer. But I actually shift my focus on empowering my employees and borrowing my people, coaching them, helping them, getting the information from them, understanding how they see the reality and how they see the situation and basically coaching them based on that, instead of telling them well, let me jump on a call, I’ll do it for you, right, or let me jump on a call and I’ll handle it. So I think this was an important shift, for me, at least that I’ve learned from a lot of the managers that I had. And I’m grateful for that. I’m also focusing a lot on the person like because I understand it’s affecting, you know, it’s very important to make sure that you’re that everything’s good at home, right? Because if not, everything’s good at home, if you’re not balanced, if things are troubling you, you’re definitely not going to be able to be professional. So my job as a manager is to show that we’re addressing whatever you need, right? If just an example from yesterday, right, we had a team building for our managers, and there it was outdoors and one of the cars that basically they broke the window and installed. So some things from one of our managers at Dover metrics, right. So today, I was focusing on giving time for the for my manager who was impacted by this to sort of have personal time in order to be able to recover the card to you know, review their car keys, and basically try to also find ways of how we can expense it so that, you know, it helped them.
Adil Saleh: It’s all about empathy, and showing, you know, empathy for people. And that can do wonders, you know, you want to say something kid, or you have something to ask, because this is something a lot of this, I’ve learned from you,
Taylor Kenerson: He’s really answering, I was gonna say, what are some of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned from your other positions and other managers that you’re able and you feel are really valuable to relate to other people?
Daniel Goldfeld: I think I think, again, one is not enough, right, you can do everything, but you won’t be able to do it good, right? Well, or things will grow. I mean, having a team that works on things is much more robust, allows the company to grow and builds a much healthier culture, right. Because when the new world, I mean, the new world, people are not coming to work, because they have to, they’re coming because they want to be part of the team, right? They want to, they want to feel that they’re doing something important, they want to feel that the people that are working with are people that want to work with, they want to feel that, you know, they’re treated as human beings first and only then as people that are that are generating revenue, or doing something for the company. And I think our job as managers, and this is customer success, but not only right, every department is to find this fit, right? Understand what the company needs, understand what are our needs as managers in delivering, but also understand how to give it a human face, right how to how to make this good for our team so that they’ll feel that they’re doing something important that they’re empowered, that they’re learning something new, that they’re working with individuals that want to work with, that they feel that they’re part of a team, I think that’s that’s the most important thing we can do as managers, right, give you the Give, give our employees the tools, learn from them, because a lot of things we definitely do. And, and listen to them, and try to, you know, work together. Understanding that nobody wants to, you know, not to work, or be a better employee or a good employer. Everybody wants to succeed, we just need to find a way to do it, right, we need to give the tools to each other, we need to help each other we need to understand what is strong points that each one is bringing to the table and basically leverage them instead of hoping that this will happen. And then get frustrated if they if it’s if it’s not.
Adil Saleh: And you definitely need a strong temperament like as a customer facing role. You everybody needs strong temperament, like you tend to hear a lot of things. So you got to be pretty normal and pretty fragile. Okay, that’s interesting. A lot of things that you just shared today about this mental strength and balance of you know, work and life equity with me. I was listening to Jeff Bezos a while ago. So he said, We better put it as work life harmony, as like, not like just balanced work life harmony, if something goes wrong at work, that will directly reflect to you know, your personal life. And the same goes on the flip side as well. So you I mean, the good you are, you’re loving your work, things will go fine over time, in your personal life as well. So it’s more of an harmony to what do you think
Daniel Goldfeld: I mean, I have to tell you about work life balance. It’s hard to write the terminology, because work is part of life. Right? So the work-life balance where you’re talking to there’s work and there’s life is hard for me and this is why I know it’s not it’s not a popular notion right now, but it’s part of life. And it’s life not because it has to be but just because it takes so many hours every day right? We’re doing it .
Taylor Kenerson: Daniel I love. I love that you just said that because honestly, I agree, I completely agree it’s integrated, there’s not a separation, there’s only a separation on what you’re doing. But it’s not that work is a part of life, life is a part of work. And until we see the two married together, and seeing like, oh, wow, you have to dance with both of them. You have to be able to live your life while processing things and seeing how life can relate to work. Because you can find you have so many, you know, solutions in your life that you can apply to work, or what you do in your everyday job. So I think understanding that key aspect and kind of breaking the mold that it is not different, as different as we think. And that’s critical. That’s, that’s amazing.
Daniel Goldfeld: Yeah, yeah. They’re having your work, right. And then it’s part of life. And even just you just you don’t, you don’t want to miss them. I mean, there’s a lot of professional experience, but those experiences are good. I mean, they’re there. They’re part of what you’re doing. There’s successes, you’re, you’re happy with your success, right? This is something that is empowering, you can happen, you reward, right? And if there’s a challenge, it’s also affecting your life. Right. So I mean, it’s such an important part, I think work is such an integral part of life so that we,
Adil Saleh: and seven, eight hours that you spent every day Monday to Friday, that’s part of you, that’s you, you know, and you gotta be a better version for that part of your life. Great, great. So tell me more about this, this thing? Because I’m thinking, like, two years, three years forward with
Converge.io? How do you guys see your plans, like in terms of growth, on the company size, as well as the technology growth? Of course, metrics, revenue, metrics, and everything? How do you guys plan that thinking of next one to two years?
Daniel Goldfeld: First of all, that data science is growing, right? A lot of things that we see today are the result of data science, right? Or a search outcome, correct, autocomplete recommendations in Netflix, those all come? datasets, right, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is going to grow. I mean, the world is moving to not intuitive decision making. But data driven decision making and data driven decision making is basically focused on getting as much data as you can processing it and getting the information that you need. So we’re in a very, very growing domain. One of the reasons why we’re part of Intel is because Intel is actually a hardware vendor, right? They’re doing the processors, this is why they need the software that it’s actually meant to develop the right, the right, the right chips, work the way it should. So for us the next two to three years is actually addressing this market of data science and providing them with a platform because there are no actual real platforms that are doing what we do or basically sort of a unique offering in that domain.But also increasing or making data science, which is usually considered to be a very, very hard domain to get into right, you need to you need to have a PhD. So we’re trying to make this a much easier experience for people that do not have the PHP did a PhD, right, where we’re opening this for developers by building predictive models by offering the SAS model by basically sort of doing the heavy lifting for them integrating those data science models directly in their code. So for us in the next two to three years is, growing the data scientist world and basically getting as many data scientists in the platform and basically providing our system as an analog ops on a lot of different vendors, right, you’re probably going to see us in a lot of different servers provided by Intel, by Dell, by Nvidia, others, and others. But also addressing the developer market with our Blueprints offering where developers will be able to sort of just use existing pre built data models and just integrate them into their code and get data science within their code without actually even understanding how it works. Just basically. So
Adil Saleh: Done for deployment, you can you can put it there.
Daniel Goldfeld: Yeah, just basically shipping the data and getting them getting getting answers, right and using the answer that they’re getting, or the data that they’re getting the output just within their code.
Adil Saleh: Got it? Got it. So like, how efficient is that code going to be like? Is that going to be like standardized format, like you’d have some some sort of already there?
Daniel Goldfeld: It’s already it’s already actually available within convergent our SaaS offering. And basically what you do you basically send your data set. This is basically the data you want to check. For example, you want to send the picture because you want and you want to ask the question do we do I see a traffic light within the picture, right? And there’s basically an output that you’re getting back that there is a 95% chance there’s a traffic light on the picture, right? And you can do this with a recommendation engines. Image process doing big data processing. So basically everything that you need, basically, you just need to send something to us and with the question that you want to answer, and you get the response. So basically, you can integrate this into your code, it’s already it’s already live. And there’s a lot of different engines that visitors can use.
Adil Saleh: Great, great. So what about the target audience, it’s ensure you haven’t found product market fit as yet. And you may think of for small businesses, you may think of having a small, efficient PLC model. So to you know, get them going, especially for SaaS model that you have, you know, for this data science as a service model that you have, how do how do you see your customers like is what is the exact target market is that medium scale to large scale enterprise or large separate, like what is
Daniel Goldfeld: By offering the on prem solution, which is usually more of an enterprise offering, right for, for bigger organizations, organizations that have an airtight system with no defense, things like that. So this is the big ones where they want to have their own data, they want to control their own data, they just want to have a platform integrated within data within their data center, but also the small ones. And this SaaS offering comes where you don’t need anything you don’t even need, you don’t even need to have your own environment, you can leverage intervals, resources, and basically run those experiments. So it can be a data scientist that is sitting, you know, doing a project or a freelancer, or this can be all company with, you know, two, three data centers that are just working on the data. And this can be an enterprise with hundreds or 1000s of data scientists all across the world that are running different experiments and want to have transparency and visibility into others are doing and also not to, you know, exploit too many resources because this in data science, resources, every every every mistake will cost.
Adil Saleh: Yes, absolutely. And you need to optimize your costs. Since they are especially on the backend, like the server side and data side, optimize the cost, you need to think of at least a million customers. So that’s great. I really wish you guys good luck, the way you have started and your journey so far and where you guys are heading. That’s super interesting, because we spoke with SaaS back from there was doing data sensitive service for Customer Success teams
involve.ai if you recall, or if you know, so they’re also doing similar thing. But they’re more geared towards providing insights recommendations based on their data that they collect. And then they train it internally, their team of data scientists and then they put insights and provide data that drives action. So this is something very, very interesting for engineers. I love that. I love that. So is there anything you wanted to share? You wanted to ask people that you want to reach out to you this year, your credentials on LinkedIn or whatever is best for you just speak it out loud, so people can reach out and have your powerful insights and share some knowledge with you and learn from you. Just like we did today.
Daniel Goldfeld: Yeah. First of all, I would love to talk to people that have any questions or ideas of Vulcan data scientists and data science and customer success. But I think if you’re asking me what would be my sort of bottom line for customer success in general, not only in converge, I think the most important part is in this world where, especially when we’re SaaS oriented, right, and people can our companies can concern at any point. I think we’re constantly need to understand what is the value that we’re driving, and what is the market trade that we’re addressing, right. And this is only comes from customer success. Nobody else can address this, because we’re the only ones that are talking to all those customers for a long period of time if we’re doing our job. And we can basically provide those trends. We can explain this internally into the within the company to everybody products, r&d sales, this is this driver from from those times.
Adil Saleh: Great, great. It was really nice meeting you today, Daniel, just before we leave, you can just share your credentials like your LinkedIn so people can reach out and talk to you if they need any help or any kind of knowledge from you. Because I know you’re a powerhouse of knowledge. When it comes to building Customer Success teams, please go ahead.
Daniel Goldfeld: Thank you. Yeah, so I’m available at Daniel at GoldHill.tnet or Daniel at customer success that, feel free to reach out.
Adil Saleh: Wow. Wow. Once again, Daniel, do you have any questions here?
Taylor Kenerson: No, absolutely amazing. So many insights honestly from myself. That’s why No, I love having these conversations. You just you know you find out so so many different things. And you also see how integrated and connected so many things are in so many people on so many ideas are no matter the industry or the field so really powerful. Thank you so much, Daniel, you’re the best.
Daniel Goldfeld: Thank you Taylor. Thank you.
Adil Saleh: And thank you for being having such a positive appearance and you can see why that that is not something that you get to find with a lot of people. Thank you very much.
