02:44:00 路 Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:44:00] S0: Is the dentist a day trader? [02:44:02] S1: See, it's your job to pick someone wildly and then defend it throughout this article. Recent trial in Shorewood, Wisconsin had all the trappings of a minor legal dispute, disgruntled neighbor. A defendant representing himself who called his own father as a character witness. You love that. Hey, dad. Tell them I'm a good person. 130, 100 and, $313 were at stake. $313. That's 31300垄, if you're paying attention. If it, but an if academic and devoted dog walker Paul Florsheim gets his way, the case will go all the way up to the Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court that is, and reshape the contours of shoreline access to one of the Great Lakes. It started when Florsheim started walking his two dogs past the Lake Michigan property of dentist Daniel Domagala, locally known for the time he spends in a tiki style boathouse and deck that doubles as a surveillance post. From there, Domagala monitors traffic and sets off alarms to scare walkers, swimmers, and kayakers away. He's got an air horn. He's got an air horn. He sets it off when somebody comes Woah. It's crazy. Florsheim repeatedly ignored signs outside of the dentist's house that said private property behind the sign, only water access behind this beyond this point. Demagala kept calling the cops and the village eventually issued a trespassing citation rather than pay the fine and walk away Florsheim dug in at stake is what right people in Wisconsin have to take a shoreline stroll. It's high stakes stuff, and we'll be following this case closely, of course.
02:45:37 路 Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Farza Majeed, Bret Taylor
[02:45:37] S0: We have One of the most important stories in technology. [02:45:39] S1: Importantly, we have Brett Taylor from Sierra here in the waiting room. Welcome to the show, Brett. [02:45:45] S6: How you doing? [02:45:46] S2: Doing great. How are you? [02:45:47] S1: You going dentist or dog walker? We won't make you take a side. That's a tough question. [02:45:52] S0: That's a tough question. [02:45:53] S1: We're gonna ask you the real tough questions. How's business going? [02:45:57] S2: Business is great. We just crossed 200,000,000 in ARR. We were Great news. I was hoping to get a gong out of that. [02:46:08] S1: Of course. Of course. [02:46:09] S0: That revenue revenue gongs are always the best gong. [02:46:12] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, fundraising is easy. [02:46:14] S2: Yeah. And today we announced we're a certified FedRAMP high, which really simply put means now federal government agencies have access to Sierra, which I think is really exciting. If you look at, you know, the conundrum of the federal government, it's like we want greater services for our citizens but we have a really big national debt. I think AI is gonna be a huge benefit to, you know, programs whether it's, you know, getting a passport or Medicare. So this is the first sort of the door opening so we can serve these agencies which I'm really excited about.
02:46:14 路 Bret Taylor, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:46:14] S2: Yeah. And today we announced we're a certified FedRAMP high, which really simply put means now federal government agencies have access to Sierra, which I think is really exciting. If you look at, you know, the conundrum of the federal government, it's like we want greater services for our citizens but we have a really big national debt. I think AI is gonna be a huge benefit to, you know, programs whether it's, you know, getting a passport or Medicare. So this is the first sort of the door opening so we can serve these agencies which I'm really excited about. [02:46:45] S1: Interesting. I don't think of like you're breaking my brain because I don't think of like getting a driver's license to the DMV as like a customer service interaction. But is that where we're going where more and more of these like like [02:47:03] S0: an address change on like an ID. Like something Yeah. Like, you know, if if Calling the tax department. Calling IRS. There's a lot of these. [02:47:12] S1: So, yeah, I mean, what
02:47:12 路 John Coogan, Bret Taylor
[02:47:12] S1: So, yeah, I mean, what [02:47:13] S2: all these government services. Got Medicare, you've got Medicaid, you've got the Department of Veterans Affairs, you've got, you know, immigration, like, you know, the passport agency. All of them run large call centers, but more importantly, people depend on them. You know, people depend on them. You have, you know, someone on Medicare or you have a vet who depends on Department of Veterans Affairs for their health care. It's a really big both payer provider. If you look at, you know, what we do for, you know, folks like Cigna and Blue Cross Blue Shield and you squint, well, it's almost that entire stack in a in a federal agency. And, you know, for good reason, there's just a very high bar for cloud technologies when you're serving the federal government and this is the main certification that kinda opens the door there. We're already working with a few agencies, none that I can fortunately talk about today. We work with FINRA, the regulator. Mhmm. So we we've always been really passionate about, we want the best technology to be available even in regulated industries. And so it's a big step for us. We're really excited about it. I hope hope we can contribute to the quality of life as US citizens, you know, and do so in a way that's a lot more cost effective.
02:48:17 路 John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:48:17] S1: Yeah. I'm I it's interesting. Like, would you would you is the is the biggest low low hanging fruit just taking some of these agencies and making them available twenty four seven? I feel like one of the most frustrating things that I run into is like, call from nine to five. And I'm like, I have a job. Yeah. [02:48:39] S0: The thing like the difference between interacting with like a public utility versus like waste management. Right? Like waste man like waste management. Right? Like Yeah. You know, maybe it's not perfect, but like it's pretty fast. Like you can get stuff done. Like it's efficient. And then like the trying to do the same exact thing with like a public utility, you know, usually you I I I always personally estimate like, okay, if it would take me like, you know, ten minutes with waste management, it'll take me like thirty minutes with a public utility. Sure. And so like bringing bringing that there's there's no reason that those two things can't be at parity, but it is entirely it is almost entirely a a technology and like process Mhmm. Problem.
02:49:22 路 Bret Taylor
[02:49:22] S2: Right? A 100%. And there's a couple of factors that I think go into why it's so hard to have great experience with some of these government programs. You know, first, a lot of people do need to call things on the phone and it's only been the past couple of years that we could digitize a phone call with AI agents. So we've essentially digitized the last remaining analog channel and everything you said is true, could it be twenty four seven. As importantly, it could be multilingual. If you imagine staffing up a big call center and you wanna represent all the languages in this country from Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, you know, like go down the list, really really expensive to do. Now you can do it at scale. Each new language, the marginal cost is effectively zero. And then the other part of it is for good reason, as I said, there's just a a really high compliance bar for technologies to be available. And as a consequence, if you look at, you know, what waste management or just pick any private company, they can go off and get the best of breed solution for any given technology problem they have. That is not something all federal agencies can do. And so what I'm really proud of is that CIRA is the best of breed solution in customer experience. We power everyone from, you know, Singtel to Rocket Mortgage on our platform. And now because we have this certification, federal agencies have access to the best of breed solution in this space as well. And so I'm really hopeful. I think AI if you look at some of the parts of the economy, the governments, both state and federal, the healthcare industry which has gotten progressively less productive over the past decade, it's one of the few parts of the economy that has, I think AI is incredibly important because these are the parts of the economy that need productivity. You know, we actually want to have great service as citizens and reduce our spending. AI is the answer. So we're really passionate about it. We're patriots here and we love our technology. And so I'm just excited that we can apply it in a in a in a great way.