Episode #23 - Sagi Eliyahu - CEO & Co-Founder of Tonkean
July 15, 2020



Thu, 6/11 2:48PM • 44:18


people, code, tonkin, operation, create, companies, teams, rpa, customers, makers, tools, build, big, enable, escalation, email, solution, process, software, work


Saji, Ben Tossell

Ben Tossell  00:02

Okay, On today's episode we have Sergey, from Tonkin surgery. Welcome.

Saji  00:09

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ben Tossell  00:12

Yeah, awesome to have you joining, just tell us a quickly a quick intro of who you are what Tonkin is.

Saji  00:18

Sure. So Secchia, founder and CEO of Tonkin start dunking, actually the almost four and a half years now. We've been doing we've been, you know, saying telling the story for a while now. And so the market grew with it. So it's also fascinating to see how things progress don't get is what we call the operating system for operation operations teams. In a nutshell, it's apart from the unable operation teams, ops teams, you know, anything from legal Ops, sales ops, revenue Ops, finance Ops, HR Ops, I have you know, every department has an operation team now and we can talk more about that. But basically enable those, those people to create their own personalized, customizable solutions, what we call adaptive solutions, with no code to really gain efficiencies in their business process and solve problems in their, in their business workflows.

Ben Tossell  01:24

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely huge. In this sort of current Corona world that we're seeing, there's definitely like a big, like a big emphasis on operational efficiency. And yeah, we can definitely talk about that. Yes. Interesting. You said that you've been around four and a half years or so. What was is this always been the iteration? Has there been many pivots and things like that, and what was we talking about no code back then. And I mean, did you even talk about it now? I suppose.

Saji  01:57

Yeah. We always talked about we always talked about that concept of how technology and people works together. So I before, before Tonkin, I was fortunate to working in a public company where I grew a team from a handful of people to over 100 people and as part of the executive team, and I was also really young. That was like, early 20s. And so I had this new always fresh look into every meeting, I went into, you know, it's, you see them that you sit in that meeting, you talk about price, how those things needs to work, and my reaction was always, really that's how that's how it's been done. You know, are you serious? Makes no sense. And I'm a tech guy, I'm a software person. I've been writing code since I was, you know, 10 years old kind of thing. So for me, software was always the solution. And while trying to create those new processes, you know, Know how sales team needs to work with engineering team, how do we handle, you know, customers problems and so on. I always went to softer. You know, I tried to create, too, I called hack away, you know, the different tools that we use, or to create a new tools and new applications. And it never seems to actually solve anything. You know, it always felt like, if you actually do want to get things done, you need to go on a on a call, or an on a meeting, you know, back in the day, you know, we used to actually meet people face to face. Yeah, but that's kind of where the lightbulb hit when, when I realized this is actually not about software. It's not about data. It's about people. And if you don't actually adapt to the way people work, they're not going to use the systems and so it doesn't matter how fancy or your your tool is, or how much of customization you and you add into it. If it's not a align with the way people work and in the way that they want to work doesn't adapt to them, then they're just not going to use it, and then you're missing the mark. And so that's kind of filled, you know, like a big realization to me. Where tools today technology, specifically within organizations is, is sort of built the wrong way. That's kind of the feeling that I had, and enabling people to write their own solutions focused on those human centric processes. That's kind of where we started. And so in a way, we always said the same thing. And we that, you know, five years ago, no one actually understood what I want from them. But the solution itself obviously went through, you know, some, some turns. I think the biggest realization though, the, we had two or three of those terms, but the biggest one was, which was the last one was about a year and a half ago. And that's When we, instead of going to business users or to sort of like the department heads, we sort of realized the potential of operation teams. And so I touched it in the beginning. And you know, 10 years ago, we had dev ops and marketing and sales ops. But today, you have operation teams in every department. Yeah. And those are the critical, I think people tell people that are going to impact significantly the future of work.

Ben Tossell  05:37

Yeah, I think that it's interesting how you talk about it and how you think about it with people in mind. Like you said, People often build software solutions to be the solution. Forget that there's usually people throughout that process of or there is someone at this point, regardless, and I i've been sayin Recently to a number of people I've been speaking to that, I find it funny when, like a company or a tool is trying to be actually the all in one solution of like, this is your notes, your wikis, your docs, like your team meetings, everything is going to be on here. And I'm like, I just I don't think it's gonna I don't think that's gonna happen. I don't like I think you'll have some things. But then if you've got cross, if you're doing cross like cross functional work across teams, the salesperson wants to use air table and Salesforce and whatever else. This person wants to use this thing and it's always like a balancing active, okay with how do I pull these together and the process there is built around. I want to touch on our table here, touch on Salesforce here, and then so and so at the end can do this thing.

Saji  06:53

You touch Exactly. This is basically our biggest philosophy difference, which is There is no such thing as all in one. In the reason business processes are so many of their workflows so many of the day, there's two reasons in my mind, one is what we talked about is that business processes are actually about people not about data. There is a big part of it, but it's actually about the people and, and the ROI of the person, something people are not talking about, like, oh, but the ROI of the company, but what's the ROI of me as an individual to use, you know, x software. And then the second point is the business partners are actually extremely personal. In fact, you know, you take, whether it's, you know, how do you onboard accounts, you know, customers or how do you onboard employees, or how do you approve, you know, expenses, whatever it is, it might look from the high level similar, but you take, you know, 10 companies with the same five tools, and you'll have 100 different permutations of how they do it. And, and that's kind of where it goes to what we call the last mile problem in operations. You know, you're familiar with the last mile problem in transportation. Yeah. Right. It's like you have, let's say, even even in commute, you know, you have rail, you know, a railway train line, that takes you 95% of the way. But if it doesn't, if there's still a mile from the station to your, your walk or the station to your home, you need to solve it somehow you need to have, you know, bicycles, or you know, or you need to walk or you need to take in a shared ride or taxi, whatever, right? So, like, all of a sudden, that becomes sometimes even more expensive than the entire thing. So you might just cut it and just take a car and drive directly. Right. And so we we basically took that exam. Boeing used it in operations. Because just like you described, even if you buy this fancy tool that really takes you most of the way, and is built for the power of the company, by the way, I'm not saying those are bad, I think they do get a lot of value, right? But everyone has their own front door, right? So if you don't, if you don't think about who are the people that are part of this process? And how do I design solutions that work for them? Then you kind of miss the mark. That's, by the way, why the, our platform sits on top of everything. So we think ourselves as an orchestration platform. Yeah, we don't replace you know, your CRM, we don't replace your contract management system. We're not replacing your communication tools. Instead, we're allowing those operation teams which I believe sort of hold the key to you know, how the process should look like right? Like what are the limitation what is the best case scenario and enable them with a no code capabilities to sort of create that modules that can connect to all the different data systems and so satisfy the ROI for the company but can also interact with the people themselves wherever they are. So that we're bridging that sort of last mile, allowing you to stay wherever you want to stay. Like you mentioned, every table in Salesforce, I'll just kind of use those right, you want to stay in our table, you know, you do that this other team stay in Salesforce. Everything will just work behind the scenes, including reaching out to people in email or Slack, whatever it is to, to align the ones that are not living in either, which is, you know, usually the things going on, you know,

Ben Tossell  10:43

yeah. Yeah. Like how you say it's an orchestration platform. And like mega pad is almost like, we're trying to teach you to be an orchestrator. Conductor orchestrator, teach you to be that conductor yourself. of like, you can build these systems like Yeah, there are multiple ways to string these two things together, or these multiple things together. It's just like is one possibility? I think maybe this is like, this is the conversation lots people aren't having that are worried about, like, no code or automation or RPA being the thing that takes away their job, they think automation is going to take my job. But really, it's it's just like helping you. It's like aiding you get away with your job, right? I think it's, it's like, probably in your in the analogy you mentioned, it's there to help you with that last mile problem, or they do the 95%. And then you're still there to do the creative, big valuable piece that you need to do at the end. Yeah, so when you think about that,

Saji  11:51

so I first of all, I love the concept of makers. We're constantly saying that, you know, we're we're we're trying to empower Because operation seems to be makers, as they are, you know, there's actually I just read a quote like, a week ago from the castle, which I was surprised. It's only about I don't know if you know this quote, he basically says, computers are stupid. They can only find answers. And what I love about this is that it sort of encapsulated misconceptions that most people have about what it means to be smart. Right or even what it means to be human. But most people think, oh, you're smart, if you can find answers, but in reality, we actually good as humans, we're like, makers, right? We're, we're craftsmen, right? Like, that's like where we, where we strive we are good at coming up with questions. Finding questions is the real hard part not finding the answers and so creating that sort of an empowering those people to with any no code environment really, but create their own Sort of like tools and capabilities that will help them find the answers, but they're the one who thinks to design the questions. Yeah, that's really where people are way, way better than machines today and maybe even ever, right? But machines are much better than us in finding answers. Finding answer is surging through a lot of data. You know, that's really what it is candidates making relations. We're not good at it. We never were right. It's like, it's more of fine understanding the, the place of where


our skills are.

Saji  13:37

The valuable, the most valuable versus, you know, other things that kind of were designing the process with that sort of people first mindset, it's coming up with an enablement for those for those individuals to create, and versus just you know, do so that's why I love the no code movement. I think. I think we We strive to be a big player there, too.

Ben Tossell  14:02

Yeah. You think? I mean, I don't know if you've seen, no code seems to be seems to be like dividing the crowd. Right now. I'm doing a talk later, actually, when I touch on it, but it's, I think even because it's called no code, it almost sets the narrative of you either code or you don't. It's like, pick sides already before you've even looked at whatever the thing is, which I don't think is fair. But it's interesting to see like, the world of the no code is right now is very small. And then you're talking about like, Operation operators in like, different departments of companies. I imagine large and small. Like how do we how do you even like and then if you've seen this, you do this often, I suppose you have to like, convince people will show people the power of this is what you could do. You are like this operator. You are like this solution builder, you are a maker. But most people don't like identify with a certain term for something. So how do you, like get around it?

Saji  15:12

So we spent actually, some of the things we're most proud of, is that when I say it sort of people first it's more than just, you know, some of the capabilities and, you know, not going to get into all those. But that concept of how do we enable you to think from a person perspective versus from the limitation of the tools? In a way for me, that's an abstraction layer. Right? So I think the real potential for no code is once and that's why By the way, we went with operating system for operations teams, because what is an operating system, right? It's an abstraction layer, instead of, you know, even when the first questions systems like from Microsoft and Linux came up with Really what they allow you to do is you can, you can now save something to the memory without knowing which memory chip it is, you know, before that you had to assembly assembler and literally choose, you know, work differently depends on what was the manufacturer of the memory chip. Right. And so like, what it does, it's makes things easier. Sure. But it also an enabling a new type of who's the person that right software act, that definition of software in a way changes to? Right, yeah, the things you can do with it. It are now new. And so basically what I'm trying to say is that the no code for me is it's not about anything bad. Anything against coding the opposite. Right now, like I said, I'm a software guy, it's actually sort of adding this abstraction layer is not only going to make it simpler, it's gonna create new opportunities to leverage technology. And I also don't like the word automate, because it's also like overused, like you have to leverage technology literally as a lever to do more and focused on the right things on areas where up until today just weren't possible, because you were so shackled into the limitation of data. And in AP eyes, and now all of a sudden, once you have that layer of orchestration of abstraction, you can talk, you can solve problems that felt like you just couldn't solve it before. Oh, no. How can you solve it? You know, the only way to do approvals is by nagging someone in email. It doesn't look like something you might be able to do. But without technology, you can and that that sort of layer of abstraction has the potential to completely change how we do work. But it's not me that gonna do that. It's you the operator, right? You're the one that knows how to how you'll walk home. business works and function. What are the gaps? What are the different people needs? Or what are the business needs? And if I can enable you to right, use leverage technology again, to solve those business problems, we might see completely different workspace in the future.


Yeah, I think

Ben Tossell  18:20

in one of the slides I made, it was like, the no code movement is it's just enabling software development for the masses. It's like, the end goal is to create software, whether you're writing the code or not, and someone wrote somewhere. I think they do report on different industries. And one of the things he broke down was developers write functions to write less code. And then other developers write frameworks to write less code. And then they develop API's to do even less code. And then they build no code tools to write no code. I thought that was quite quite interesting way to look at it.

Saji  19:00

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the point. Every time there's an innovation on the on the on the operating system layer or the framework layer, there's a new type of developers that doesn't even know how the network protocol works today, they just call an API, you know, they just call something, you know, it's like, it's literally people that comes out today are not having a different set of knowledge than the ones that did five years ago, 10 years ago, doesn't mean that they can do less, it's actually something new, we can do more. But more importantly, they can do different things. So I think no code, we should always trying to separate the marketing from the essence, you know, yeah. You know, it's no code because most people that doesn't know how to code sort of afraid from coding. But like you said, and I love the way he says creating software. Forget about the coding is just the way you do it. Yeah, software is the meaning.

Ben Tossell  19:54

Yeah, exactly. And how do you think just as a as an industry as a whole We've got to teach people that they are operators or they know how to do these things. And they are seeing like, that's what I think is one of the interesting pieces or the things we have to solve is show them their exact thing and say, okay, you you spend your time putting potential leads in a in a database, and then you've got a click to try it. No, you got to go into each one, Google them, try and find the LinkedIn. And then you've got to like, enrich that data, pull stuff from clear bit, go and find the email and then send them via slack to someone else who will who feel like, you've got to literally almost say that exact process as someone who does that, and they say, Oh, yeah, I do that. And you say, well, you can do this whole thing. Like, you can automate 80 90% of that already. But how do you how do we get to the wider to everyone and see, because I think it's similar with like, Don't and it might just be showing more people like, we need a bigger stage to show. Look, you can do this thing. And this is how you do it because I've seen, like RPA for me, that industry came out of nowhere. I've never heard of it until maybe last year, year before last, then all of a sudden, these huge companies were like taking over everything. And I was like, what, what is this? Oh, they're just sort of connecting things together sort of no code as well. And all all you ever see or if they have a talk, or if they have a podcast, anything, it's always like, Oh, yeah, just imagine if you're a customer sales ops person, you do this, and you're doing this, and this is how you do it. And you think it's just a lot more education that we need to put out there. Oh,

Saji  21:44

yeah. I think Funny enough, most RPA companies actually exist from what for 10 years or so. is just you know, takes take some time. I think there is an education piece to it for sure. But I think First of all the wind are changing sort of speak, I think more RPA is one of it, but sort of those out, cost my own personalized app built, like companies, you know, you mentioned air table and others are growing, I think the, the big shift is gonna happen once those hungrier operation makers or, you know, other makers within organizations are gonna continue to continue to grow that core sort of unit. I think that as people we always try and work and I'm saying it in the best way possible. We are lazy, you know, yeah. And laziness is just, it's just a great motivator to, to do things more efficient, right. And so I think at the end of the day, everyone always in their head after seeing it's got to be a better way. Do this. Right. And I agree with you, you know, most people need to just see that thing. Right. One of the things we're doing, by the way, we started sponsoring a new community for cross function, operations, operations community, that's the address. And it's about bring those makers together to share things, the way the way they solve things, not only on talking, I can just in general, right, and what what type of things you've built, and maybe sort of cross pollinate between different operation teams of how I you know, solve that approval problem, how do I solve this enrichment problem? You mentioned how, you know, in China sort of teach each other, how to think about things more efficiently. So I think, I think definitely, it's gonna be it's gonna take, it's gonna take some time, it's gonna take some education, but, you know, when I look at you know, even on consumer, you know, when you think about iPhone or Android with with an app store. My parents, your parents, I'm assuming, you know, what do you mean an app? It's an app. Right? That was like the beginning. And now there is they're just assuming that there's going to be an app for, you know, everything. And someone build the app. Right. And it was hard to build apps. I actually, you know, had the experience to write code into Symbian into you know, Nokia's of the past it was it was like, really messy man. Yeah, it's really easy to write apps now. And it wasn't like that until, you know, Apple and then and then Google added that sort of abstraction layer on top of the app store's so I think, I think that's kind of that's kind of what motivates us. But I think that's what motivates you as well. And and all of us in that space to try and to create that awareness but also have the tools and knowledge to enable more One One more people more build more and more and more those creations or software creation is, you know, that we get to that sort of point where everyone start to think differently about the work that they're doing and asking where do I bring value? And where is this can be, you know, can be done by a module or a bot or a software, right?

Ben Tossell  25:25

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think also, what we're seeing a lot of is, I mean, there's a natural pool for makers who want to be entrepreneurs, founders who identify as founders before. They're actually founders. I think that was definitely me. years ago, just I was working somewhere else. I thought, Yeah, well, I know one day I'm going to be entrepreneur or founder and I'll go stick at it until then. And if a website in a certain like the onboarding was like, what, what was your day job or something? I'd be like, entrepreneur. The founder. And actually they guess it's one of those things that yeah, it's enabled so many people now to you can be that founder a lot quicker, a lot easier. And actually, they might be the one of the best core groups who become so empowered early on that they can do this thing. They're like, Oh, wait a second, I can also do this thing at my job to cut down all these hours of work, open up the hours, I can work on this side thing. And it's sort of like an almost all around. benefit. Yeah, I suppose it's like the laziness. So how do I make this easier for myself will make it more efficient, because of the time where I don't need to be spending time. Yeah, we're gonna always see a lot of money, which is interesting.

Saji  26:45

That's why I love that. That's why I put a lot of my trust in those operation teams. For me. Their job is to come up with efficiencies, right. Their job is to try to make things work. And so we like to To say we help them become the stars, the stars have their own show kind of thing.


Yeah. And so I think, I think that's,

Saji  27:08

that's something we'll can start from there. And we'll see it in, you know, across the board when more and more people realize that they're where they're, you know, going back to that coolest, like, where they're bringing value is coming up with questions. It's thinking about things in a creative way. And, you know, when you look at to the new generations of people, you know, a lot of a lot of people can say, this or that about millennials and others, you know, it's like, at the end of the day, they were born into a new platform, you know, the things that they they're unable to do, you know, so many YouTube and tick tock stars, you know, it's crazy. And it makes a lot of sense because, again, enables them to, you know, to not be shackled to the old Ways of, of how do you become famous is no longer the same way. Right? So it brings things from out of people that, you know, no one could expect. And it's it's pretty cool.

Ben Tossell  28:11

Yeah, and even sort of putting a weird positive spin on the lockdown is how do I learn something from her? Like how do I now start linking language via zoom? Or how do I have dinner parties with my friends? Or how do we do quizzes online and it's like all this whole different online interactive. We've all been flown into, not that it's changed much for me, but it's, it's, yeah, it's one of those things that yeah, it's interesting to see that there's always new ways to do things and new opportunities if people like take them and run with them. So we'll talk about Tankian for a bit and seen as that's what you run and we I put out a song just looking at it on my screen he put out a post recently about Announcing your series A with lightspeed and some of the some other previous investors and you you posted the email that you sent to your whole team what how was how big is the team actually?

Saji  29:15

So about 30 now

Ben Tossell  29:17

okay nice So what was the what was the story behind this email and obviously this is I recommend looking at blog dot Tonkin calm and check it out the first thought is pretty interesting. Thank you What was the motivation here?

Saji  29:34

So it was when we were fortunate to close that a round right when COVID started, like few weeks into into the, into this new reality. And it was sort of you know, the now now now, I feel the word is a little bit more adjusted to this, you know, to this new reality. But the first month and obviously Everyone knows that the first one was kind of scary, you know, a lot of people, you know, there was, people are dying, people are losing their job before, you know, everyone are closing home, and it feels like everyone in this situation. And it was like balancing this, you know, weird reality where I, you know, friends that had to fire or got fired, you know? So it's like, how do you balance that with great achievement that we had as a team? You know, we worked hard, and we were able to raise a substantial round, and with great investors, and we're super excited about the future and how do you balance those two things? Were at the same time, the sort of the third part of it was and I think you alluded to the beginning of the call as well. There's not a better time. There's nothing more important right now than understanding how to adapt on this day. Learning how to adapt your business how to adapt your process, how to focus on people, you know, people are having a hard time right now how do you as a business as a leader? How do you focus on them? And so all of those things together felt that I don't want to go outside and be like, Yay, we raised you know, a lot of money and look at us kind of thing. Yeah. But instead, you know, being more thoughtful about it. And so, so I sent a send an email to the entire company and, and sort of laying out my thoughts. And when we were thinking about what to do for the announcements of the round, like hey, why not just shared the email I sent everyone? So we went with that.

Ben Tossell  31:40

Awesome. Well, yeah, I really enjoy reading it actually. And this is a quote to note which is there's always a way it's just a matter of finding out which I saw on your website as well as that as like one of the core values of the of the company has enough. So what is the What's this round? Full what's the next piece? What makes Tonkin so exciting and different from other things that we may have heard of? Yeah, let's get your, your insights on that.

Saji  32:11

Yeah, I think the round is to grow, continue to grow our, our message into the market where we're, we're fortunate to have fortune 20 customers, all the way down to, you know, 100 people, companies, and even less.



Saji  32:32

we've we had the time to build the product. And obviously we're continuing to iterate on on that as well. But really, it's about, you know, having firepower to to go into our story, and help as many companies and as many individuals as we can. We're doing some help with the COVID I can't share it yet. But we're working with some nonprofits to help do it obviously for free and have built the Those optimizations to we're trying to, you know, we're trying to basically grow our, our presence, but really from from the core of it and sort of we talked about that sort of people first approach, enabling and creating that sort of operate operation teams layer, right and pushing them to the front stage and enabling them to own their own solutions. So you don't need code, you know, the only engineering dependencies on one hand, you don't need it dependencies on one hand, but at the same time, you create a unified layer that is more manageable, and, and still has access control to it and stuff like that. That's, that's really, completely new for for most companies, you know, you have RPA, and you have integration platforms that help you with data, that's, you know, plenty for those. And then there's applications, whether they're already built over there. There's no other no coast cloth and have to build applications. And those are great too. But not every problem is an application problem. Not every problem is a data problem. And so that does void is just people taking keep being able to slack you know, doing that manually. And it's more it's more common than you think. And so I think that's what the investment community saw is that we sort of found the creek the behind it, there's just a huge ocean of possibilities. And we're very excited to to grow to grow this market and, and bring you out of

Ben Tossell  34:43

it awesome. I'm excited to see what what you bring out to and I mentioned before the call and that I saw Tonkin A while ago, I think it must be in the euro. So when you first announced must be in a seed round. Something I think I'll put it in the newsletter and then someone actually got hired because they saw that they saw it saw you guys on there and then went and got a work with you know? Yes. And and then yeah at that point it was no code RPA was like the tagline I remember what's, what was. And it's and I see that there's not that today so what's the difference you see or is there a difference or is it just a way of framing things or how Yeah,

Saji  35:32

yeah, you are, we have an iteration of the messaging that was robotic robotic automation for human in the loop processes. Alright, so it was like RPA for a human centric process. The reason we sort of graduated, I see that way into sort of that operating system is because I actually a thing we saw from our customers. So we when we started, we We saw our pa helping companies in certain part of the manual work that they have. And then there's a huge gap where everything that touches people. And so when I go, we're like, we're like that. But you know, we're touching the human side of things, because we are doing robotic work and we are doing processes and we are doing automation. So it felt like, you know, we just a flavor of that. But as we brought on more and more customers and helped more and more companies, we actually heard feedback back from the customers that is, doesn't even see it in the same bucket. They're seeing it more of that sort of orchestration layer. Because we're not replate makes a lot of times we working alongside, you know, we're sort of the modules that you'll build in talking with initiate bots in RPA with initiate, you know, other applications and so, it is that orchestration there. And so we just listened to what our customer said then And, you know, the language accordingly? Yeah,

Ben Tossell  37:04

fair enough. Can you explain to me one like, as a fairly straightforward example of what a process would look like with? Could you talk about it touching different tools, and it'd be a human, like human interaction also. So how does that how would one look in a simple example?

Saji  37:22

Yeah. So if we'll take one of the example that I like the most is actually in legal because everyone in their life touched contracts in one form or another. And so when you think about legal intake, which is a process that basically would when you get a request for a contract or stuff like that, traditionally, you would go online and search for contract management system, because oh, I have a problem with a contract. I need to manage my contracts, right? But in reality, that's a big part of it. But that's not the only part to a lot of a lot of times you Go and you'll spend a lot of times onboarding a new vendor or even create your own or you know, do those changes, but then you realize, no one's actually using it. And why And why is that? Why is it because your salespeople or hiring managers, they don't really care about that new fancy corner magnet system right there. They just need help with an NDA. They just need someone to review their contract and so on. So they'll continue to do what they always do, which is sending emails to legal or slacking, you know, the legal channel, whatever it is, hey, where can I find an idea? Right? And so, that is that's one side of it, that's the intake, but then on the other side of it, you know, now you need to get several approvals maybe or you need to escalate it to someone in the case of a VIP customer or, or a custom clause that is needed or whatever it is. Those sort of areas are not within the Contract Management System because that's so personal to you. So what will what you will do, and you'll be able to create a module that connects to that main contract manager system, but it also connects to the different again, quote unquote front doors, right? So to the email legal at company comm to the Slack channel, to you know, maybe the CRM, maybe the engineering project manager system, whatever the all the different areas and channels and venues that exist and will orchestrate it in a way that you know, use NLP use an email to understand what is the request or they need then they need the NDA. Maybe I can just generate an NDA for you automatically, just automatically reply to the person save time save trouble. Oh, you need an MSA? Is that a standard MSA that you just returned to you? It's not a standard. Let me pull in the right person from the legal team and have them answer What needs to be done, but they don't need to change their font, or they can continue that, say legal works on email, and you work on slack. You know, you can both stay in wherever you like to stay, and talking with sort of coordinate and orchestrate that. And so the beauty of it is that that, you know, traditionally sounds complicated, even if you are a software developer, creating that type of software is sounds complicated, but we've built, we wrapped and packaged a lot of those capabilities out of the box, we can obviously integrate with all the different tools. But then we have what we call the people coordination engine, which is basically just a fancy way to say we know how we know how to interact with people, when to reach out what to do when you're out of office, what channel to choose to reach out how often to nag you, or you know, to follow up with you. And so for the end user, for the maker, for the Operation person, it's just dragging and dropping, you know, boxes into the into the screen, all in sort of this a synchronous context aware solution anyway.

Ben Tossell  41:13

Awesome. Yeah. No, it makes sense. And yeah, I really see how that is slightly different to what I've seen or like heard before where Yeah, that really is the human touch and, and that sort of stuff there. And if you really

Saji  41:29

frame it's also the frame of the problem, right? And I'll spend maybe 10 more seconds on another example. When you have a support request comes from a customer and you have an escalation process. Most people think that an escalation means take the day take the ticket from the tier one support system and put it in the tier two support system or it may be like a ninja calm or Zendesk is your you know to one but then you need to go to to to you need to go to engineering. So you go to JIRA, whatever it is think oh, I'll just create the automation I need to do is just to create a ticket in JIRA. In reality, though 90% of the actual escalation is between the two people talking, it's like, it's like, you know, what is this? How can I do this, all this information is lost in the void of communication. But when the company is trying to understand, you know, I need to know how much back and forth how long it takes to resolve an escalation, where most excursions are coming from and so on. They don't have this information. So what what they're usually going to do is going to force everyone to use a certain system in a certain way, which is contradict the ROI of the individual to help the customer. So you like in in this catch 22, right. So again, an example that Tonkin can help would be a module that basically led the escalation happens in slack or an email, but then talking is part of the conversation. So you basically want to track everything into whatever you want to track it to see To take care of creating the tickets, but also pushing it to the right people and let them Converse and not forcing the change management, which is we haven't talked about it enough change management in a way. That's sort of the biggest hurdle for innovation. Right? Yeah. So if you can limit that the likelihood of everything to become better is is much higher.

Ben Tossell  43:27

Yeah, people are proud of their processes and tools that they've brought in or had someone say, I know, we need to look for this. And then they're like, we got to make sure we use it every day for everything. Yeah, I get that. Well, yeah, I really appreciate you coming on today. It's been awesome to chat all things, automation, and all that sort of stuff. Where can Where can the folks find you online?

Saji  43:50

Yeah, so definitely can be a good start. Operations community is a great community. We're trying to sponsor and push But Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you can reach out to me and I'm always happy to, to chat and and share thoughts.

Ben Tossell  44:10

Awesome. Well yeah, I really appreciate you coming on today.

Saji  44:13

Thanks, man. I that was great. Cheers.

Sign up for updates

Get a weekly update every Sunday with our announcements, company updates and a behind-the-scenes of what our community are building.
Over 11,000 people get our updates, join us!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Join us

Get access to our learning community and pro content.
Request access
Or explore other ways to work together.
Partner with us →