Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:00:00 · Gaurav Agarwal, S1
[00:00:00] S0: If I see what separates the legendary businesses, like, the reason why Facebook is what it is is because they have preserved their entrepreneurial DNA. Because in a world that's rapidly changing around you, the product behaviors, the UX patterns, the distribution paradigms, the only way you survive and and continue to manage your edge is by being entrepreneurial. [00:00:20] S1: Welcome to the Second in Command podcast produced by the COO Alliance and brought to you by its founder, Herold. In the Second in Command podcast, we talk to top COO's who share the insights, strategies, and tactics that made them the Chief Behind the Chief. And now, here's your host, Herold.
00:00:44 · Cameron Herold, Gaurav Agarwal
[00:00:44] S2: Our guest today is Gaurav Agarwal. Gaurav is the COO for ClickUp, an incredible software company that our team loves and companies that we have as members of the COO Alliance are raving about. ClickUp's chief operating officer is leading a productivity platform designed to enhance team collaboration and efficiency. In his role, Gaurav focuses on driving team's responsibility for marketing, growth, sales, data, and unifying the customer experience under one motion. Prior to ClickUp, Gaurav was the SVP of growth at Freedom Financial Network. Before that, he was the CMO at Molekule. He also has a rich background in growth and business across a range of industries from investment banking, ecommerce, hardware, fintech, and SaaS in both start up and scale ups. He's a systems thinker at heart. He's also a passionate people leader. He's also very focused on blending the best of b to b and b to c worlds and rewriting the stock growth playbook for the future. He also talks to us about his growth trajectory, leaving India, moving to Singapore, over to Japan, getting back into The United States, back to India, and back to The USA again. Fascinating episode. Fantastic leader. You're gonna love this. We'll see you on the inside. This is an episode you may also wanna check out on our Second in Command podcast YouTube channel. So, Gaurav, welcome to the Second in Command podcast. [00:01:59] S0: Thanks, Cameron. Thanks for having me.
00:01:59 · Gaurav Agarwal, Cameron Herold
[00:01:59] S0: Thanks, Cameron. Thanks for having me. [00:02:01] S2: Yeah. Very much looking forward to this. I have been a fan of your business, of ClickUp. You and I are both... Or I used to live in the city that you're living in right now, which is a a big tech hub, in The United States, Seattle. I wanna chat a little bit about that. Also love to know how a kid from India came to get over to The United States and and is now the second command for one of the great brands in the in the tech space in The United States. And I also wanna know a little bit about, you know, what it's like being a COO of a of a tech company. So why don't you start us off with, let's start with ClickUp, and then we'll kinda go back into some of your backstory. So tell us, for anybody who doesn't know what ClickUp is, what the business is, why it exists, and then we'll kinda dive in from there.
00:02:42 · Gaurav Agarwal
[00:02:42] S0: Even if you may not recall ClickUp ClickUp, there was a time where we bought billboards all across the country. And our pitch was all your work in one place or one app to rule them all. So from the genesis, we have been focused on businesses and teams don't need to be working across a dozen tools, but we should be consolidating work more and more. So ClickUp is your everything app for all your work. We bring together docs, tasks, projects, clips, all the different tools that you use, whiteboards. You bring all of these tools together in one place. So instead of you having to toggle multiple different tools, all your work stays in one place. And the gains of that is more productivity and more efficiency because you don't lose time you don't lose time in switching context. And we have a lot of good stuff coming around, but we are building to that vision where we want to build the model work stack, which is really one tool or one app to rule them all.
00:03:34 · Cameron Herold
[00:03:34] S2: So one of the things I that I love about this tool is that it is kind of everything that you need in one space. It's also very clean, very easy to understand, very intuitive. But at the same time, it's complicated if you've never used a tool like this or you're switching from another. How... And and a friend of mine said one time that a a shovel does not dig a hole. Right? If you give somebody a shovel, it can just stand there unless you know how to use that tool. Right? Like, this iPhone would make a great hammer if I wanted to smash stuff in. But how do how do you teach companies how to adopt a tool like this when they're not using anything in this space?
00:04:13 · Gaurav Agarwal
[00:04:13] S0: ClickUp score... You you may question, like, there are other products like ClickUp. How is ClickUp unique and differentiated? Not only do we have the best platform vision, but we are also the most flexible platform. So that means now this shovel can be shovels in different sizes and different tools that further adds that layer of complexity that not only do I not know how to use the shovel, but what you're giving me is this Lego block type shovel that I can use and and assimilate whatever I want to. So that further compounds the complexity that you're talking about. Ultimately, it comes down to because the platform is so flexible, I would say there are two groups of users who want to use ClickUp. There are the power users, and these are the operation nerds. They care a lot about process and they care about how does one thing here impacts the other thing somewhere else. And for them, they love the tool because for them, they can build whatever they wanna build out of it. And that's what they appreciate. They they... We we have a lot of resources. We have ClickUp University. We give them all the information that they need, but then we get out of their way and they set up things the way they want to set up. But then for the other people who would rather... Who who who need a hole more than they want to dig a hole themselves. Yeah. Because the platform is so powerful, we package solutions on top of it. So for example, this is... We we we found it so amusing. The number one CRM for small businesses on g two is not HubSpot, it's ClickUp. And we can do it for, like, why? How... Why are people doing it? And it turns out that they are using our our CRM template. So so what we do is on one side, we want to preserve the flexibility of the platform and give it to the power users. On the other side, we are constantly packaging more and more solutions on top of the platform so that any business can go and start using it. And then we have a... I I take a lot of pride in our support team that we have built and in our services team. So all the way from free help to paid help. And then there's a rich community of consultants. These are small business owners that make their living off of consulting for ClickUp or providing ClickUp services. So there's a whole ecosystem that people can also engage to build more stuff on ClickUp.