Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:15:58 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:15:58] S2: The technology you guys are really competing with in many ways is, like, twenty years old. So it sort of feels like an unfair fight, candidly, in so many ways. And you guys together have built companies that you've taken public, you know, billion dollar businesses. Can we just like step back? Why'd you choose this area? Because in so... I mean, I obviously love it, but in some ways as the world is like AI and robots and less jobs and let's lay off, you know, 50,000,000 people, you're like, let's go focus on humans. Brian, why'd you guys pick this area?
00:16:36 · Brian Distelburger
[00:16:36] S0: Yeah. So for me for me, this has always been something that's really important to me. As we built up Yext, I cared a lot about the people management side of things. The people we had at the company would spend a ton of time on it and dealt with every situation you could imagine in terms of good management, bad management. A lot of the things we've hit on here in terms of personal development, coaching, and things like that, we sort of assume that a manager is good at that. But you know what? A lot of managers really struggle with that kind of thing. And one just specific case where a manager is not very good at that kind of stuff is a lot of times people will be in a role that is not right for them. And so unless the manager has worked in a bunch of different roles and a bunch of different scenarios, they might not even be able to identify that something else is right for an individual. And so when you zoom way out, so it's always been an area for me that I cared about very deeply. When you zoom way out and think about what are the big challenges in the world that we're all gonna deal with? I'm excited for stuff like going to Mars and the moon. That's awesome. Let's definitely do that. But also here on Earth, I would argue we are gonna go through a civilizational level change management problem. We have not seen anything like this in our lifetime for any of us. I think this is one of the most important areas that person could focus on and think about and work on. And so as, you know, having young kids and and a family and caring a lot about my friends and family and loved ones and what the future is gonna look like, work has always been a really important part of of humans' lives, and I think it's really important to be working on charting out what that future looks like.
00:18:28 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:18:28] S2: Brian, I wanna double click on that. You know, I I always say when the world zigzag and very much that it feels like very contrarian for you guys to lean really hard into this. And at the same time, that's why it feels so accurate. But let's... You just said something, and I I think that we need to unpack it, which is we all kind of know we're going through this pretty profound moment in humanity with the the... We have AGI is how I I I I think we're basically there. Say more when you're like this is the largest change management moment and why Windmill is a solution.
00:19:14 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:19:14] S0: Sure. So you can look at, like, kinda where we are today as a as a lens. And right now, the biggest problem at every company that people are struggling with is changing jobs and roles and how they're gonna use AI to do different things and what that means for the people, what that means for the future of their business. Everyone in tech is worried that what they're doing is gonna be commoditized by the model companies, and cost structures, and all this kind of stuff. And so, all this stuff, this is the tip of the spear. We're just getting started in a lot of this stuff. And so you have the companies that are at the bleeding edge of technology that are trying to reshape their organizations right now, and trying to figure out what that means for all the people in their companies, And for people that are at different stages of their career, trying to figure out what skills matter, what is important. As they're coming out of school, it used to be you could follow a certain track and major in something, and you sort of knew what the future was gonna look like, roughly. People are terrified that that does not exist anymore. And so, I would... You know, we're dealing with this huge level of uncertainty. I don't think anyone can accurately forecast exactly what things are gonna look like. [00:20:32] S2: Agreed. I agree.
00:20:32 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:20:32] S2: Agreed. I agree. [00:20:33] S0: But there are some things I think we can say today with a pretty high degree of certainty. One is just the sheer output from agents is gonna be enormous relative to human output. We also know that we have a system and structure in society where individuals are accountable for work. So, given those two factors, where you have agents producing all this kind of stuff, humans then become the bottleneck for the output of work. And so, figuring out what that looks like for individuals, getting them in the roles where they can be successful and add a lot of value is gonna be a massive change and open up different roles and responsibilities that just did not exist even even two years ago. [00:21:20] S2: In somewhat weird way, Brian, is Windmill almost like an agentic h r... C h r o?
00:21:20 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:21:20] S2: In somewhat weird way, Brian, is Windmill almost like an agentic h r... C h r o? [00:21:28] S0: So so... Yeah. Let... So tying it into Windmill. So as Max was saying, we believe there's a missing sort of system of record at every company. As you think about that HR stack, there is the HRIS systems, which is where most of the dollars for HR teams go. And that's basically a list of all the humans, and they're like comp, Ben, and stuff like that. And then there is the bucket of performance management y, learning and development type of systems. And then there's the bigger bucket, which is a majority of a company's software spend or technology spend, which is all the different systems where people actually do their work. And the two are not connected. And so you have people doing their work in all these different systems, and then you have the system at the center of what's supposed to be the HR tech stack that is a dumb system. And what I mean by that is just it doesn't have the context from everywhere else. We believe, sitting in the middle, there needs to be what we're referring to as a context graph for people. That missing system that has the context from both places to truly understand the work that's being done in an organization and how people are contributing to the success of the organization. [00:22:47] S2: Max, what would you add to that?