Marc Ferrentino - Chief Strategy Officer at Yext

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Marc, the Chief Strategy Officer at Yext, and we discussed the differences between leadership and management, how they're implementing recharge days to help prevent burnout, and the importance of having a community of peers to bounce ideas off of. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Marc at 00:00:39) Hello, hello, hello. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Good, man. Marc, I'm excited. Your video looks great.

(Marc at 00:00:47) Yeah, does it? I still feel like a prisoner. Like I'm shooting a film where it's like maybe holding up a newspaper just to prove my authenticity or something. It's like one of those, I don't know. I had a good background for a while, but then I moved, and now I'm back to this clean wall background.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) Where'd you move to?

(Marc at 00:01:05) I was in New York for the last twenty-three years, and I just moved to Miami.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) Oh, wow. So you're down in Florida now?

(Marc at 00:01:14) Yes, yes I am. I'm swinging that state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) We are about an hour south of Tampa.

(Marc at 00:01:21) Oh, okay. There you go. Nice. So you're doing good. Yeah, this is, I love it, man. I've been here for like two and a half months. It's been amazing. Three months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) Are you missing the weather change, or are you just pumped to not have another twenty-fourth year in the freeze?

(Marc at 00:01:36) I have never—some people are like, oh, I love the seasons. I've never loved the seasons. I'm one of those people that used to get very depressed at the end of every summer because I just love the summer all the time. The summer is by far my favorite season. I'm not a huge skier, so this has been—it just took me a long time to finally make the move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) Well, it's full-time summer here.

(Marc at 00:02:01) I know. That's what I'm looking forward to. And I'm feeling it already. Remember, I got here in August. It was hot, you know, but I'm okay with it. And then it was also hot in New York. And so when I called my friends and coworkers, they were like, yeah, of course, we're also outside. Big deal, you know? And then now here we are, October—I thought, you know, it's starting to get cold. I called my buddy in Denver. It snowed two days ago. So yeah, now I'm starting to really feel it. Plus the weather's starting to get good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) It's about to break a little bit, but well, welcome on behalf of Florida. Apparently I represent Florida now, so—

(Marc at 00:02:36) The official welcoming committee of Florida. Thank you, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) It's my two jobs, podcast host and then Florida welcomer. So I did see that we had a common connection with Parker from Salesforce.

(Marc at 00:02:50) Yeah, I worked for Parker for five years, a little less than that. Also, when I was a wee tyke and a younger version of myself too. So yeah, Parker was—Parker's the man. I don't know what else to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) Did you get to work with him at Salesforce?

(Marc at 00:03:08) Yeah, yeah, I worked with him at Salesforce for a bunch of years. I was the Chief Technical Architect over at Salesforce for five years. I didn't report directly into Parker. I was one level away from him, but we'd have, you know, me and Parker, you know, did lots of interaction with him. When I got to the company, when I got to Salesforce, it was in 2006. The company was going through a pretty big transformation. I think the act of operationalizing a cloud company, which at the time the term cloud wasn't a thing, was one of the more difficult things to do. He was the first to do it, and I think the classic methodology of software development at the time was your classic waterfall model, and that just wasn't working. It wasn't working. And I got there right when he realized, okay, the old model doesn't work. I need to try something new. And he was one of the first adopters of the agile methodology, which was pretty cool. And he brought in consultants from the outside and completely changed how we operated. And so I was there right in the middle—I got there right in the middle of that transformation. It was funny. And for a bunch of years, it was so early and so ahead of where everyone else was that a lot of times when we'd go to speak with customers, they wanted to hear about our agile transformation as much as they wanted to hear about the company. And so there was a presentation that he had done for some keynote somewhere. Then I had adopted it, and a bunch of other guys had adopted it, and we were sort of his disciples running around the industry and talking about it. And so, yeah, it was kind of a pretty cool time, pretty transformational time. A lot of concepts, by the way, that are just sort of commonplace now. People don't even think of them as special, you know, or different. But at the time, they were revolutionary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) You could have written a book on it, right? You're in there early. You saw the transformation happening.

(Marc at 00:05:11) Yeah, yeah. No, I know. I feel like Parker should write that book now. Maybe I was just sort of like, I was like twenty-five years old. I was like this guy—twenty-seven years old. I graduated as a young guy. I didn't really understand what was going on. But yeah, yeah, it was cool to be a part of it. And then, of course, you know, from then, cloud started to become things that became a pretty consistent model. I mean, a lot of it was really talking about IT transformation and talking about, you know, okay, well now that there's this concept, what does it mean from an innovation standpoint? What does it mean from a release standpoint? What does it mean from a staffing standpoint? What are the set of decisions you can make? What are some new infrastructure concepts that maybe need to be introduced? So, yeah. Like Todd McKinnon, for example, who you might know from—the CEO and founder of Okta. He was our VP of Development when I was there. And, you know, a lot of the concepts of Okta was exactly that. It was recognizing that, like, okay, we're probably not going to be the only player out there who's delivering a solution in the cloud. You know, this is in like 2007. Maybe, just maybe, there might be some other ones. And if there are other ones, then, you know, having this concept of single sign-on in the cloud was, at the time, you know, there wasn't a lot of cloud services. So it didn't seem not insane. It just didn't seem like a thing. But he called it exactly right. And that we were going to be adopting more and more software this way and that a unified sign-in concept was going to be pretty important. So he took an existing space that had been around for a bunch of years and brought it to the cloud and made it new. And that was just one of those things that we used to preach when we just talked to CIOs and CTOs of organizations—just what it means to move to the cloud. So, nice. Simpler times. They weren't simpler times. They were just different times. Things that we take for granted now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) I know, right? The magic of nostalgia. So how did you end up meeting Howard and joining Yext?

(Marc at 00:07:20) Oh, so I had started a company called Nomi. Basically, many years ago, 2012, 2013, that time frame. We were Google Analytics for the physical world. The idea that if you can measure and meter the physical space the same way that we measure and meter the website, that would be kind of a cool thing. And it was a cool thing. And so how do you do that? How do you digitize the physical space? We did it through sensor technology. We actually went with a multi-sensor approach. So we did cameras. So a lot of video analytics, combined that with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signal analytics. And all of that, we took together. We took all that information together and we created a picture of the store that was, you know—and the interface looked a lot like Google Analytics, and it was a web-based something that the store owner would log into and get decent analytics like, you know, time in store, count, overall count, bounce rate. I mean, people bounce in the store. Somebody walks in and leaves, bounce, right? So yeah, it's not unusual when you think about it, right? Because the online existence was mimicking the physical world, right? And then, of course, once we moved online, we started iterating. And then so the idea of taking the online enhancements, advances that were made, and then bringing it back to the physical world is kind of a neat idea. At least conceptually, academically, it's interesting. And so, yeah, we started that company. Now what ended up happening over time is that the company, I mean, from a sales standpoint, it was through the roof from the beginning. Because great story, something people needed, lots of interest. Even if they didn't buy into the whole big story, the concept called door counting was actually already established. I don't know if you're familiar with this. Retail stores, counting the number of people that walk in the door has been going on for twenty years. And so at a minimum, we were a super fancy door counter. Because in its full vision, we were Google Analytics for the physical store. So we really came out of the gate strong from a revenue standpoint and booking standpoint. The hard part was the sensors. Getting physical hardware into the store, getting it wired up and installed was not the easiest thing in the world. So we wound up, in the end, selling the company to a company called BrickStream, who was the manufacturer of our camera. And also, they had a services arm, so they kind of knew how to do installations better than we did, and that was sort of how that worked. But in that process, I was another New York startup CEO, and I met Howard through the scene. And, you know, I had met Howard and Brian Distelberger, who was the other co-founder of Yext. And after I sold Nomi, I did my earn-out. And actually, I was trying to sell our beacon business to Howard because we had built our own beacons. We were one of the first companies at that time to build Bluetooth technology based on that spec. And he was like, no, I don't want to buy your beacons. He's like, but what are you doing? You know, what are you up to? And I said, oh, well, you know, I'm almost done with my earn-out. And so, you know, he's like, well, why don't you just come on board and just hang out and see if you can, you know, how you want to contribute to the organization or not. And what was so crazy about that, the way he said that to me, the way he positioned that to me was that that was exactly what Marc Benioff had said to me in 2006. He's like, why don't you just come on board and we'll kind of figure it out from there. And it was just like that. It was such a weird way of taking a job, right? Because normally you take a job, there's a job. It's not sort of like a come on board and just figure something out. But yeah, that's kind of how it—so it was just really, it was like a déjà vu moment for myself with Howard that I'd literally experienced almost, you know, almost ten years prior. So it was kind of neat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) Yeah, it makes sense as a tactic, though, right? Because when you have something that's not completely formed, that's not fully processed out, that's not the repeatable function you know you need to perform and hire for, you kind of need somebody to come in and float and figure out what's going on and can assume that role.

(Marc at 00:11:47) Yeah, I guess. I think it's also a tactic just to recruit people too. It's just sort of like, hey, this is the person I like. You know, this is the person I like, or that is a good person. And, you know, I don't care. Just get them on board because the way to build really great tech companies is just to fill it up with people who have done things, you know, done things before. So I think that's another part of that core philosophy. It's just like, you know, if you just stack the team, that's another great way of getting things going. So yeah. And then that was it. That was sort of it. I honestly, to be perfectly honest, I got to the company and the company was doing location listings, which I had no idea what that was. And I learned what it was, and I said, I can't believe this is a company, but it is. I can't believe this is a thing, but it was a thing that at the time they were doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and they were really crushing it based on this one product. And it took—I remember thinking to myself, like, okay, here I am, you know, with my previous company, calculating and triangulating Wi-Fi waves bouncing off the wall. You know, really sophisticated stuff. Really intense learning models that we had to create for it. And then here's another company who's killing it making sure information is correct across the publisher network. But upon being there for a few months, I realized that there was something way bigger going on at the company, like way, way bigger. The opportunity was a hundred times what it looked like from the outside. And that was really around natural language and conversation and structured data and sort of this whole world that—it's one of those things where within being there for like two months, like, the five-year roadmap, like, just, like, it was very obvious what it was, you know, within only a few months of being there. And so that was sort of the beginning of our march towards where we are today. But yeah, so that was—and then to be honest, another big thing, when you get to a company like Yext is that just like Salesforce, where you've got guys like Marc and Parker, there's just a quality of people that they hire. They're just very good at assembling a really high caliber people, and you just can't beat that. That's just such a special thing to bring that together. And Howard does that. He's really good at that. He's really good at bringing really great people together, you know, getting them in a room, getting them to move forward and just making that happen. And it was that same energy I felt when I got to Yext that I had felt at Salesforce all those years before, which was pretty cool. And I hadn't really seen much of that since I left Salesforce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) That's good. That's how you know what's right for you, right?

(Marc at 00:14:33) Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And little did I know there's, like, a dozen Salesforce people joined the company a year later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:42) So you mentioned they solved this one problem that I didn't really understand the word you used, but I'm sure you could elaborate a little bit.

(Marc at 00:14:49) That's exactly right. You didn't—no one understands that. I didn't understand the word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) Yeah. And then they changed problems, right? Or it evolved. So where was it before? Where is it today?

(Mark at 00:14:59) Yeah. So if anyone doesn't know what a listing is, so for location data on the public web, if you use Google Maps or Apple Maps, right, those things are, you know, just do a search on any search engine, you will see sometimes, you know, sort of the business. You know, like there'll be like a card or something. It'll be like, oh, here's like, you know, the local pizza place or something.

(Mark at 00:15:22) That is what they call a listing. And it actually derives from the old yellow pages business. So from the yellow pages books, the books that they used to send out, each one of those rows of the book was a listing. And so when those, and there was, you know, these big yellow page companies that existed, and they sold advertising against those things. And, you know, these were big businesses for many, many years, for decades.

(Mark at 00:15:47) When it moved online, it maintained its old name. It maintained the listing name. And so the act of managing that information that was previously in the book, but now on the Internet across all these different, you know, yellow page competitors—I mean, Google was a yellow page competitor. They're all yellow page competitors because that's what they're doing.

(Mark at 00:16:06) They're now competing with another form or another conveyance of information. Right? Is that we used to get it through a paper book, and now we get it online. And so it maintained that name. And so that's what a local listing is.

(Mark at 00:16:19) It's just act of controlling and managing the information about your business across, you know, in our case, 150 different global publishers. And so there is actually that many websites and publishers that exist in the universe that actually house the brand information about a specific company. And so, you know, what the product was when I got there was really straightforward and quite ingenious in its simplicity. And the real genius was around really the business model that Howard had flipped inside out, where previously the publishers were paying for that data from data aggregators like InfoGroup. And he had flipped it on its head and said, you know what?

(Mark at 00:16:58) Actually, you know, we're gonna charge the customer and make it free to the publishers. And then so, of course, that would be the highest quality of data. And it really goes down to the sort of core principle that the, you know, the business is the ultimate authority on itself. And so they're the ones who in theory should have control over their own information. Seems like a basic concept, but that was the original business. That was the original idea behind the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) And then where has it gone today?

(Mark at 00:17:23) Well, one of the things I noticed when I first got there was that, you know, why is there this need for structured information? Why does everybody want it? Right? And we kept having, you know, the Google, everybody kept asking for more. They were thirsty.

(Mark at 00:17:36) They were hungry for more and more and more. And you started to realize, well, structured data is really the foundation for a lot of AI applications. Right? And more specifically for natural language AI applications. And what it was was that, yes, people were searching with natural language more and more and more.

(Mark at 00:17:55) That kept increasing. The need for it kept going up. And so the search engines wanted more structured data so they could power these natural language experiences. And so what had happened at, you know, Google, Amazon, Apple, take your pick, Bing, is that they started to develop this technology called the knowledge graph. And I don't know if your listeners are familiar with the concept of the knowledge graph, but it is a, you know, 30-plus-year-old computer science concept.

(Mark at 00:18:23) It's really just a name for a type of organizational data structure. And they had, in essence, these different vendors, these different publishers had developed their own knowledge graph, and they started to fill it with all of the world's information. So they were actively structuring information, putting it into the graph, their graph for the sole purpose of delivering this natural language experience. So whether, like I said, whether it would be Bing or Google or Amazon or whoever. And so this was the beginning.

(Mark at 00:18:53) And so in the process of us collecting more information, right, we created this tool for brands, for companies to log in and to put their information in. We wound up mimicking the graphs of all these different publishers. So before you know it, we had evolved into a tool that was a knowledge graph, basically, a cloud-based knowledge graph that any brand could build out. And so as the sort of set of data that we managed grew, we started out at locations. We went from locations to people, you know, so, you know, doctors and loan officers and financial advisors and you name it.

(Mark at 00:19:34) You know, plumbers, electricians, et cetera, et cetera. Then we moved to like menus, and we moved to events. And so we've kind of continued to expand the amount of data, thus broadening that graph that we were managing on behalf of the brand. And so that's been the evolution for a couple of years, and then we sort of took that and we said, okay, well, let's generalize this because that's always my favorite thing to do is to generalize abstract platforms.

(Mark at 00:19:58) That's always where the leverage comes in. And so, you know, we did a kind of a set of very specific things, but after a while, we saw that there was a generalization to be created. And so we created a generalized knowledge graph platform that allowed people to create any nodes, any objects they want, any entities they want to represent in the graph and sort of connect them all together. For any of you who doesn't know what a knowledge graph is, so we like to describe it as a brain-like database that holds all the information about a particular topic. It is more of a conceptual data structure than a sort of literal data structure.

(Mark at 00:20:32) So your classic relational database, which is typically more oriented for transactional types of applications, would be a relational database would be better for that. Knowledge graphs are better for data that actually has multiple different types of relationships. So for example, you and I could be two nodes in a graph, and you and I could have different relationships. Right? We could be coworkers.

(Mark at 00:20:52) We could be friends. We could be a lot of things, but we're still, you know, they have multiple different types of relationships between us. And graphs are really good at representing that, which is very much like what data is organized in the real world. Right? There's lots of different things in the real world, in our conceptual world, in the sort of human mind where we have different data types that have multiple different types of relationships between them.

(Mark at 00:21:14) Even though it's the same, you know, sort of the same objects. So that is a data structure that is also really, really, really, really good and really optimized for servicing natural language or being able to deliver a natural language experience. And so that's been sort of the continued evolution of the company. And so, you know, the knowledge graph we launched a couple years ago, and then the next, of course, evolution of this was really going into search. We said, well, Jesus.

(Mark at 00:21:41) You know, we have this incredible asset here. This, you know, we have all these customers' knowledge graphs that we're managing for them. We've got, you know, great technology of taking information and structuring it. You know, what would be that next thing that we wanna do? And so we started looking at really what we wanted to deliver, what we thought the future was.

(Mark at 00:22:02) And we still think that the, you know, for us, like, the bigger trend that we still feel like we're a part of is this trend of conversational experience, conversational UI. We started out with Google and natural language search, and we think it's been moving to chatbot, and it's gonna continue to move. And we just think that conversational experiences in general are gonna continue to proliferate across the digital world. Because you know what? We like to talk.

(Mark at 00:22:27) We're people. We like to talk. Right? That's what we do. So it's not gonna be, it's gonna be completely natural that the most comfortable interface for us with the computer is going to be just simply talking to it.

(Mark at 00:22:42) Right? And so if you think about that concept, what does that mean for marketers? What does that mean for brands? What does that mean for companies who have marketing teams and digital experiences for their customer? Well, they're gonna want to, hopefully, deliver the best possible experience.

(Mark at 00:22:56) And Google's got a big head start, by the way. And so does Amazon and so does other guys, I think. Head start. And the brands are really way far behind, right, on this stuff. You know, if you look at the experience on Google versus the experience on any brand site, I mean, good god.

(Mark at 00:23:10) It's a, I mean, you know, there's a huge gap. Big gap in that. And so when we started realizing, okay, we had built these knowledge graphs, we said, you know what? We have an opportunity here.

(Mark at 00:23:21) We have an opportunity to bring something new and special to the market. We have an opportunity to help each one of these brands bring their customer experience, bring that journey experience up to it being on par with the consumer web. Maybe even excelling past the existing consumer web. Could you imagine, like, coming off of Google and actually having a better experience on the brand side than you do on Google? That's like, that would be weird right now.

(Mark at 00:23:46) You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:48) It's very possible with Yext. Look, I'm not just saying that because I like you guys. Because, well, the reason why I like you is because I went on your homepage, you know, in our prep, and we're like, all right, let's figure out what these people do and how we can really, you know, bring them a lot of value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) And to wrap our minds around the product, I just went to the home page right on the front. There was like a Farmer's Insurance icon, and it was like, click to see it. And you just go right to their website, and it's your implementation of Yext. And I said, oh, this is really smart. Like, the way it mixed the search results of the website when you were searching for something, but also predefined like answers or however—I don't know what the terminology you guys use—FAQs or answers or whatever it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) But there was like three or four different, and then I saw at the bottom, it was like, your results customized because you're from Bradenton, Florida. I was like, oh, man. So they're taking location into account. They're taking the site. They're taking my query.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) They're providing me, like, it was really, really, there wasn't a really great way to describe it at first. I was trying to think. I was like, well, it's kind of like, you know, an FAQ support system for an app, but on steroids with mixed-in Google search results. But that doesn't really do it justice. It's kind of like its own little unique concept.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:01) How has the market, like, has, what does the market call it? Are there competitors? Is there, like, how do people refer to the product that you guys make?

(Mark at 00:25:11) Yeah. I mean, so that's exactly right. That's the current sort of progression of the history of the company is that now we are providing, we are allowing for brands to provide their own Google-like experience on their website. That's exactly right. That is what Answers is.

(Mark at 00:25:28) Our Yext Answers product is all about sort of leveling the playing field for brands, allowing them to deliver an experience that we believe is actually better than Google in most cases. And it's made, a lot of it's because of the algorithm. A lot of it's also because of the data. Right? The data is very important.

(Mark at 00:25:43) It's been pretty, it's been, I can tell you as someone who has done multiple startups, who has been at some, you know, big companies and small companies, the adoption has been really fast. And the sort of brand-level names that we've gotten in a ridiculously short amount of time has been, and I know I work for the company, and so it sounds like I'm a sales guy, but it's like, and we're all salespeople at some level. But, I mean, you know, World Health Organization, like, you know, Verizon, PGA, you know, Krispy Kreme, like, these are brand names that you don't, you're not supposed to have, you know, within nine months of launching a product. You're not. You just, you're not.

(Mark at 00:26:20) That's not how it works. That's not how this, that's not how this goes. Right? This game is not played that way. Typically, you start with some small customers, and then you grow the customer base over time.

(Mark at 00:26:29) And eventually, one day, you get to get those big names. But I think the concept was so, you know, was so sort of so obvious for most folks when they saw it and so different than what was in the marketplace today, that we've been able to do some pretty amazing things in a very short amount of time. And I think, you know, the biggest challenge for us has just been sort of changing our go-to-market towards it because it's shown incredible success in such a short amount of time. We were just like, okay, how do we, you know, how do we put more energy behind this thing?

(Mark at 00:26:59) And so, yeah, the market has received it extremely well because I think it shows, it's like one of those products where you don't need to have, like, a slide deck to explain it. You just show it. You're just like, okay, well, search for something. You're like, okay.

(Mark at 00:27:11) I get it. You know? If the product can deliver a direct answer, it will deliver a direct answer. If it's a more open-ended question like an FAQ, it'll try to come back with the FAQ. If it's looking for other types of data, it'll come back with those different data types.

(Mark at 00:27:25) And a lot of it, let's be very clear, is inspired by the consumer web. The consumer web has a lot of these concepts. And so the idea that you too can level the playing field. Right? Democratizing this technology for every brand, every business of every size, was a big push.

(Mark at 00:27:41) And so, yeah, not surprising, it's been well received. Who we compete against?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Or more important, like, how does the market refer to your product? Like, what terminology do they use?

(Mark at 00:27:52) Called Answers. Yext Answers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) Yext Answers?

(Mark at 00:27:54) Yeah. It was funny. We originally, the original name for it was like Yext Search, and then we're like, it doesn't really quite, the thing that was, I think was, we tried it on. You know, it's funny with names. Names are interesting because it's like you sometimes you come up with a name and like, the moment it happens, you're like, you know? And sometimes you gotta wear it.

(Mark at 00:28:11) Yeah. It's like a jacket. You gotta put it on and walk around in it for a little while and see what it feels like. And this one was, we walked around with Answers. We then tried Search.

(Mark at 00:28:19) We said, you know what? It doesn't do it justice. So, you know, it's, call it the same thing and it implies the same thing as like site search solutions that exist today for websites, which are terrible. We didn't want that. And so we went back to Answers as the core name, and I think that's exactly right.

(Mark at 00:28:38) I think it explains it perfectly because the goal of Yext Answers, the goal, our goal and the way we measure ourselves in the product team is that we wanna deliver as many direct answers as possible. That is our goal. We are winning and losing by direct answers. So the same way I ask you a question and you give me a direct answer, search has definitely not worked that way to this point. Right?

(Mark at 00:29:00) Think just, think about like traditional link-based search. Just think about that exchange. You know? Sometimes it's funny to, like, bring, you know, bring digital exchanges into the physical world and just sort of be like, hey, let's play this out.

(Mark at 00:29:11) How would this be if I did this? And so link-based search, if you ask it a question, it hands you 10 documents back, right? And then you have to then go read each document, hopefully finding your answer. Could you imagine in the physical world if I asked you a question and you gave me 10 things to read?

(Mark at 00:29:27) I'd be like, come on, what are you making me do all this work for? Just tell me the answer. And so I think that's what you've seen. This traditional link-based search, which was very popular in 1999, is what most websites have today. They have this very sort of poor search experience that's document-based that forces the user to then read all these documents, and it's a terrible experience. And so we said, okay, let's just try to deliver direct answers. That's the idea. If we just answer your question as is, as you ask it, however you want to ask it, that is the goal.

(Mark at 00:30:01) And so I think that name really articulates what the product is about and in the best way it can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:09) Yeah. And that's, I mean, people don't like—the origin of a search is to get an answer. So that's what we're all going for. It's just—

(Mark at 00:30:18) Not a reading assignment, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) Yeah, not a reading assignment. That would be like you would want a research tab, right? And then it would be able to mix in multiple points of view and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) So you'd want answers and research. But the future is bright and there's only more smart people entering the market. But I was curious. Earlier, or a minute or two ago, you said something about the go-to-market strategy. And when I was thinking about this from an entrepreneurial perspective, business model perspective, I was thinking, okay, so this looks pretty useful to brands because no one's going to want to boot up a team and build all this all over again, right? It would just make much more sense to use a tool that already has all the tools, and then it's not a big project. It's just something that happens. But at the same time, so I was thinking of it from a CTO perspective and I was thinking of it from a marketing perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) And it's kind of in the middle between them. So I was really curious when you're selling, do you go to the marketing teams and then CTO helps with engineering, helps with implementation? Are there developer tools? So I guess that's two questions. The first one is, who do you sell into?

(Mark at 00:31:28) Yeah, that's a big—so traditionally, we have sold into the CMO. That was traditionally what the company had done. And so when we launched Answers, we were predominantly selling into the CMO. And, you know, for the CMO who owns the website, this was not a hard sell. You would just go to the website. You would search for something on the website. You would see how bad the experience was, and then you would show them the alternate. So it was very straightforward to go to the CMO, show them an experience. And every CMO wants their brand experience to be amazing.

(Mark at 00:32:03) So there wasn't a lot of pushback there. What has been super interesting, super exciting for us as a company is that in the last six months, I've had more CTO conversations than I've had in the last five years of the company. Because in many organizations, the IT organization owns search. They own search. They own the construction of the website. They manage the website. And so what has happened recently in just the last six months is that the buyer is now—to be honest, I don't want to say 50/50. I don't know the exact percentage, but it's definitely—before, it was 100% zero. Now it's definitely—I am involved in, I mean, you know, easily, you know, five or six a week. And typically for the CTO conversations, it's obviously those are more technical conversations.

(Mark at 00:32:53) And so, you know, I'm involved in a lot of them. My product managers are involved in a lot of them. Our sales engineering team's involved in a lot of them. But it's been absolutely wonderful to see that shift happen because of search. Now going back to your second question, one of the core concepts that we wanted to really instill with the product, which is not really a revolutionary concept, but it's more of a, I think, really table stakes for the environment right now, is to make sure that Answers was a low-code solution.

(Mark at 00:33:21) Right? Low-code or no-code is obviously a very popular trend these days. And everyone's got a slightly different definition of what low-code means. I always like to think of low-code as—is that—people think low-code is for the unsophisticated user. I think, actually, low-code is really for the developer more than anything else. Because sometimes there's just some basic things you don't want to have to code. You just want to be able to click and sort of set them up. It's a very reasonable request for someone. But there are certain moments where you might want to dive down a layer deeper underneath the interface and go into the code if you need to. And so for us, low-code means that there is a development layer, a layer for developers.

(Mark at 00:34:02) So, yes, for us, it's a combination of being able to write code, change the interface, change certain characteristics of the algorithm themselves. So, you know, config as code, those concepts. And then, of course, have a layer, a WYSIWYG layer on top that lets you sort of point and click and make some changes at that low-code level. And so I always love the idea of being able to drop into code, but not have to wholly drop into it. You know? So you want to make one little adjustment, you shouldn't have to rewrite the whole thing. You should be able to just add a little code snippet that just does that one thing that's different. And so that's something that we've developed. And so as part of that, we have developed a program called Hitchhikers, that is basically our developer program. It's our admin program, and you can go to hitchhikers.yext.com, and we have a really, really, really rich learning experience where you can come in, get certified, you know, go through all the different learning modules, and then, you know, begin to learn how to implement Yext Answers and implement what we call pretty amazing search at your company.

(Mark at 00:35:11) So that is also a pretty big shift for Yext as a whole because we had never really had a product that lent itself to that. And so that's something that we had to do. So it's kind of—I mean, it's funny. A lot of companies when they're built, they're built sort of that way from scratch, and I think one of the cool things about Yext is that it kind of keeps morphing on the fly, which is not easy to do for anyone. And so, yeah, we're much more developer-focused now than we've ever been. And, obviously, the Hitchhiker program is our way to engage with that community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) Yeah. I didn't know about Hitchhikers. I just pulled it up, though. It's a really beautiful developer, engineer understanding, education area. I like it when people put time into them, and they don't just look boring. Like, here's some docs.

(Mark at 00:36:01) Yeah. This is not just throwing some docs out there. This is way more sophisticated. We kind of looked at Trailhead as sort of the gold standard. If you're familiar with Salesforce's Trailhead, they're, you know, Trailblazers and Trailhead. It's Trail-something, as the sort of gold standard of what was out there. And so we took inspiration from that, and we took inspiration from some other programs that we've seen that we were really impressed with, and we created our own that was on brand with sort of what you want to put out there, but also highly related to our own product. This is cool concept that we have in there called challenges where we wanted people to be able to go in and actually when they take a test, it's not just a quiz. You can go in and you actually have to create Answers experiences, and then we have a way of automatically grading them behind the scenes. So you literally go into an environment, create an Answers experience as part of your test to make sure that you have mastered the skill set that we put out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) That's pretty cool experience because you're learning about it while also building a basic version of it.

(Mark at 00:37:08) Yeah. So isn't that always the best way people learn is by doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Right? I could spend 10 minutes trying to hack something together and learn more than reading a book about it sometimes.

(Mark at 00:37:19) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Everyone learns that way. I've yet to meet someone who didn't learn that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) I know. I know. When I was working with different learning and development people, they were talking about all the different modalities of learning. I was like, okay, guys. Maybe people are being nitpicky, but it's monkey see, monkey do. That's worked for hundreds of thousands of years. Now I was—you got me pretty excited about this Answers thing, especially because we have a lot of content. We have just terabytes and terabytes of content. We have all of these pages and articles from all the guests and everything on our website. And I'd say half of our traffic plus is from Google, and a lot of the people are coming there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:59) And we have our little leader bot that, you know, it's an Intercom app pop that asks them what they're looking for and then they'll ask questions. And they're looking for answers to specific things. And so I was just curious, are you guys only serving larger companies or has it gotten to the point where smaller brands can self-serve?

(Mark at 00:38:17) So we are at a space right now where smaller brands can self-serve. You can go to our website right now, sign up for a 90-day free trial, and self-serve and get started. So, yeah, our expectation is that businesses of every size—you know, a lot of the sort of the genius of Benioff and what happened in Salesforce all those years was this idea of this democratization of software, right? Is that every business of every size should be able to use the best, have the best, right? And it shouldn't just be that it's something that is only available to the largest companies creating, once again, an inequality in the marketplace. And so, you know, that changed with Salesforce, and I love that with cloud in general.

(Mark at 00:38:58) And so we wanted to—obviously, we're all believers of that philosophy. So, yeah, this is something that is available for every company of every size. There's definitely not just for large. You know, you sort of throw out the large names because they're brands you know. Um, but that is by no means—we are every tier of the market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:19) So is there a really good origin story behind the name Yext?

(Mark at 00:39:25) There, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:27) Is it private? We can't share it. They're out drinking.

(Mark at 00:39:31) No. No. I wasn't there for the name. So it's—I feel like this is Howard's story to tell, not mine, as far as where the Yext came from. I think it was something about next something. And I—yeah. I'm not exactly—I feel like the origin story has maybe changed over the years too to sort of fit the company's current version. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) I totally get it too.

(Mark at 00:39:56) We named it Yext because we're solving this specific problem. We're on this mission, and then the evolution happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:02) Yep. And all of a sudden, you're like, it doesn't make any sense anymore.

(Mark at 00:40:07) No. New origin story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:09) Yeah. So yeah. It's not my story to tell. It's Howard's story to tell. It's the CEO's story to tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) I love it. All right. So switching gears a little bit, I was excited. I watched this documentary called Social Dilemma. And then I heard you had had some thoughts on it, and I was just curious what those were.

(Mark at 00:40:32) Yeah. I mean, I watched it, you know, like a lot of parents have watched it. A lot of people have watched it. No. It was more—we were—it was funny. It's just a very topical thing. It's just a very topical thing right now in general. Um, yeah. I mean, what I found to be most interesting about it was one, I am, as a parent, I am a parent of three, and I have, you know, children who are entering into the teen years and entering into the teen years.

(Mark at 00:40:58) And, you know, it's a major concern. A lot of those stories and a lot of that—the sort of the family, you know, the hypothetical family that they set up inside of the Social Dilemma to talk about sort of the impacts of it. I really I see that. I feel it. And it's pretty scary. You know, when I look at a lot of these platforms, you know, like all great things, eventually, they become weaponized, right? And so there's always this sort of evolution that happens with discovery. And you say you have, you know, you sort of this incredible discovery that takes place. It's got, you know, it creates hope for all of mankind.

(Mark at 00:41:30) And I remember the early days of Facebook and all these things that came out. There was always great stories of sort of social people coming together and organizing and all these really positive stories. And like anything else in this world is that great technology then gets weaponized at some point. And that's exactly where I think we are right now. I think, unfortunately, these platforms, which were really revolutionary at the time in connecting people, are now really threatening our democracy. They're threatening our existence, our way of life, and they are threatening our way of life. And that's just something that is—we're at the point now where I thought actually the suggestion around regulation was really the probably my favorite of them all. Not stopping freedom of speech, but I do think there are certain topics that—I love the reference, the comparison to Saturday morning cartoons, which most people of a certain age have no idea what that means. You know? Is that Saturday morning cartoons running as—no? Is that there is that you weren't allowed to advertise anything around liquor or cigarettes or things of that nature because there was a certain group of highly influenced individuals that you didn't want to be exposed to that. And I think that that concept really makes a lot of sense. I think it makes a lot of sense in this environment. And, you know, listen. Some of these guys are partners of ours, and they're great partners of ours.

(Mark at 00:42:52) I love them, but this is just—I don't know what the solution is. The genie is not going back in the bottle. Let's just say that. All right? It ain't going back in the bottle. This is—we—this is a part of our life. It will always be part of our lives. So the question was really is how do we de-weaponize this thing that was at one point this wonderful thing for mankind has now turned into sort of a horror show. And that is really, I think, you know, I don't know how it gets done. I don't know if it's an FCC, FTC, and somebody, someone has to get involved, but they're definitely—I think some sort of regulation around the types of content is probably it, which isn't about limiting freedom of speech. It's just simply saying, you know, not appropriate. Not appropriate for this forum. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Yeah. I think step one is identifying there's a problem and talking about the problem. Step two is that permeating and getting smarter and smarter people and more passionate people about that problem together to form a community around solving that problem. And then action will start. It's a slow process, but it reminds me—and you're a big thinker, so I think you'll like this—it reminds me of the story I heard a long time ago about a wife and a husband, and they lived together. The town next to them had donuts, right? And so every once in a while, like once a month, he would go over, make the voyage over to the other town—like, no cars. He would maybe walk to the other town and get some donuts, and that would be like a treat. Well, then a bakery opened in his neighborhood, and he got incredibly overweight and just his life went completely downhill. And the wife was going and blaming the bakery, right? Like, because you opened here, now you've done this to my husband. The bakery saw it as, like, this is my most loyal customer. Let's go open over there so it's easier for them to access. And so it's this interesting thing that occurs. And for me, I think about it in a few different areas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:55) The first area I think about it is the concept of personal responsibility, right? So it's going to mean more to me to be aware of what's going on and the issues affecting our youth. I have kids. They're under the age of four, so I don't have the 13, 14-year-old problem that The Social Dilemma was describing. But now it's creating a premium for parenting, right? Like, now it just makes parenting more important, because when you see the data of teen suicides and depression versus you just being involved—it's all on this device we pick up, right? There are limits. We can not pick up the device. We can control it in a number of ways administratively. So it just creates more of a need for great parents, for personal responsibility on everyone's part. Yes, the kids are young, but then that's traditionally what government is there for, right? Like, we don't sell kids alcohol. But yeah, I think that we will—I'm optimistic. In general, I'm an optimistic person because we have a lot of bright people. We have a lot of people who care. We have a lot of people who just want good things for ourselves and the rest of the world. It's just, you know, we're so used to fast changes, rapid fixes, and deployments that our government doesn't operate like that, and we'll just have to be patient. And in the meantime, while we're waiting for these policies, we just have to be extra vigilant as humans, right?

(Mark at 00:46:22) Yeah. I mean, the legislation takes a long time. I mean, there's countless stories through the last 100 years of products that you would never think to use around a child that were very common in maybe the fifties and sixties. And it just took years of awareness and legislation to take place for it to finally sort of even itself out. And so I expect the same thing that you do—that is exactly where it's gonna go. I mean, this technology is not super old relative to just, you know, the scale we're typically operating at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) So I wanna bring it home a little bit more personal because I haven't. You seem like a really open person, so I'm just curious. So, like, you watched that documentary. You have kids that are entering around that age. Did it actually, like, change the way you think about it? Like, what's going on right now with your kids? Like, what age are they, and how are you thinking about their technology usage?

(Mark at 00:47:21) Yeah. I mean, it's a really good question. And parents are sort of fighting against the tide a little bit. So it was something that we wanted the kids to watch. So we want them to be aware if they weren't already aware. And, of course, their answer was like, you know, yeah, duh. Well, I guess you guys are smarter than me. I should give you more credit because it was not, like, a shocking thing for them at all. But they were like, yeah, we know. This is, like, everything on these platforms is ridiculous. Or my favorite one was, who the hell uses Facebook? We're on TikTok. But I think, you know, as far as limiting device access, which I think is a good idea—I mean, anything. I was limited in my TV time growing up, and I'm sure you did too. I limited computer time growing up, and I'm sure you did too. So it's really the same thing. Where the issue comes in sometimes is that our lives are so interwoven with productivity tools, learning tools, and then, of course, tools for enjoyment. And figuring out, you know, like, okay, right now with COVID, the kids are on machines all day. Not screwing around on YouTube, but actually in multiple forms of, you know, whether it be in-person learning where some of the kids are remote or remote learning. Everything has been moved online. COVID has created an absolute acceleration of the digitization of school, of just all education, period. That was something that had been talked about forever. But, man, did everybody get moving. It's amazing when everyone's motivated how fast that change can happen. I mean, it happened overnight, right? You know, most schools were caught off guard in March, but they had the summer to reload and retool. And September, they came back, you know, ready to go. Many, many schools did. And so they're on devices all day. You know? That is a way it is. But, you know, most of the time they're doing schoolwork. So yeah, sometimes it's very hard to regulate one versus the other. There's apps for that, obviously. You have different apps that you can leverage for that and sort of, you know, accounting the number of hours and time that you have in each one. But kids are quite clever. They're very clever. They can figure their way around anything, and they do. They absolutely do. And so if you think you're gonna, like, put the clamps on your kid and use technology to apply—good luck with that. It's not gonna happen. It really comes back to just basic parenting. Just being there with the kid, engaging, making sure they're involved in other activities outside of just staring at their device. Obviously being a concerned parent, because at school, kids are gonna get distracted very easily on the device, right? That browser where you've got your Google or your classroom is the same browser that's sitting there with, you know, YouTube and everything else. So it's very easy for someone to get distracted. So I think it really comes still back to the basics of parenting, and this is just another tool. The other thing that's a little tough is sort of what age do you get a device for your kid? This is a very controversial topic. Very controversial. What is the right age? What do you think the right age is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:30) Alright. So my three-year-old plays on her tablet every night, but it's a Kids Mode Amazon Fire. They put it in Kids Mode, and she can't get out of it. And there's just all these little games and puzzles she's solving, and she gets it for an hour at night so that my wife and I can have conversation at the end of the day.

(Mark at 00:50:54) Right. You can exhale and maybe, you know, talk to your wife because—yes, I'm totally familiar with that. So when they're young, it's pretty straightforward because you limit it to one hour a week or whatever it is or one hour a day. You have whatever interval that you so choose, plus the kids' games are really engaging and educational. It's difficult when you get into, like, 11 years old. Now you're talking about their own device. Do you get them their own device? Do they have their own phone? Well, it's incredibly beneficial to be able to text your child as you are marshaling them from one activity to the other. So then you get them a device, get them locked down, everything else, and we allow texts and phone, potentially. So there's lots of—that is a big topic of conversation at the school that my kids go to or did go to in New York. This was a big topic of conversation with the school. The school had a really good recommendation of, like, seventh grade is the magic year. Some parents adhere to it. Some parents didn't adhere to it. You know, what sort of apps do you use to monitor to make sure that, you know, there's nothing terrible happening on the device? Because that I think is a good idea. And yeah, it's a hard decision and it's a personal decision. It's a really personal decision. There's tons of people who will have opinions, polarized opinions about this particular topic. But I just—it's just one of those things where it's your call. It's your kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:16) And that's important. That's so important because pushing that out, you know, delegating that down to the individual, that's freedom, right? That's such an important thing because we should have the flexibility to raise our kids how we see fit based off the principles we hold, right?

(Mark at 00:52:35) Yeah. And that's why—it's funny. You know, people get—like I said, people get bent out of shape about this topic, and I was like, don't—there's nothing to judge. It's their call. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:44) I'll tell you what. Life is really good if you're getting bent out of shape over what year does my kid get an electronic device. Like, we're not starving. We're not in famines. You know?

(Mark at 00:52:56) But there are some very concerned parents out there with very deep opinions. So, yeah, as you'd expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:04) The only exposure I have to this a little bit at that age is I have a sister who is 12 years old. And so I talked to my parents a little bit about it, and they basically will do, like, a review of the text messages here and there. You know, like, maybe—I don't know what the interval is, but they do some sort of review. They take the device based off of, like, time or something like that. They have a little system set up for it. But when I was talking with them about it too, they also spend a lot of time with her. You know? She comes home after school. She's at their office because they own a medical practice. And so she comes and she does her homework at the office. And then they are always aware of who her friends are and what their friends' parents are like and who she's spending time with, and they sit down and talk with her. I'll tell you what, it's like people at work too. Like, if you just sit down and talk with them, you can tell what's on their mind and what's on their heart. Like, you can tell how they're spending their time. And then as a parent, you do that with your kids, and then you can just guide and direct it. So there's—I definitely agree with the fact that, like, when I heard about the parent monitoring apps and things like that, I felt like that was like a challenge. I was like, I wish I had those when I was a kid. I look forward to seeing how I would have gotten around it.

(Mark at 00:54:20) I'll be in a second.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:23) Right? It's like, he searches, like, how do I get around this? And then he gets a Yext answer about VPNs. Right? Like, yeah.

(Mark at 00:54:32) It's really very hard. You know, what's funny is there's a—what's new in this world. So, you know, you're a parent, same thing. And our parents didn't have to do for us. And then, of course, all of our parents had to have the sex talk. Very awkward. Very, very awkward. Some more than others, the sex talk. And now you have to have the sex talk, right? Oh. Sexting, right, is another—it's a new conversation that you have to have that was not a conversation our parents didn't have to have with us. So there's a lot of—it is, you know, just basic, you know, getting in there and just, you know, engaging with your child, spending time, and having those wonderfully awkward conversations because that is your job, is to have those awkward conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:25) It is. It is. And then banding together in the community with other parents who have similar values, that whole concept that, you know, I learned in my twenties where your environment essentially shapes you. You can choose your environment. You can curate your environment, but your environment shapes you, and so those choices really matter. So if you get around other couples and other parents that have kids and you all have similar values and principles, then you have that support network and you can share. It's community, and it's so important. And as I'm getting older, I'm realizing the value of community and how important it is at all levels, whether it's, like, what we're talking about now, raising kids and technology and being near other parents, or you're professional and you're a CTO and you wanna be around some other CTOs to learn from them and the similar problems they're experiencing. I mean, humans working together and communicating and building community, it's just an incredibly valuable thing, and I'm really grateful to have that realization at this point and be able to know that I've got another, you know, 20, 30 professional years left where I'll be able to use that tool.

(Mark at 00:56:36) Yeah. I completely agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:39) So you moved. Have you gotten plugged in? Like, do you have a community yet? Like, did you make friends and do all of that?

(Mark at 00:56:45) Yes. So kind of fun is the area I moved to. So first thing, a few friends of mine had moved a couple years ago. So I was coming down to an area where I knew some people. And, actually, within my circle in New York, four other families moved down with us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:04) Oh, wow.

(Mark at 00:57:04) Yeah. Which was really interesting. And so they were all people who were thinking of moving before. It wasn't like COVID did it or made them move. It was more of a, you know, hey, we were—you know, New York is wonderful, but, you know, at some point, you know, everything comes to an end. For, like, you know, at different times in your life, different things are important. And so, yeah, we kinda had a network when we came down here. And then since that time, we have met just a tremendous amount of other people through school, through the community. Everyone's really friendly and super nice. I don't know. It's kind of been awesome in a lot of ways. And so, yeah, we've built a pretty big, you know, network and community of people in a very short amount of time. And I think a lot of that's just the general hospitality that exists, you know, around this area, which has been great. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:56) Yeah. It says a lot about you because usually you attract what you are. So which brings us into leadership. There we go. I see that. I'll just do the compliment, right? Yes. It's true. Okay. So we're a little bit over time, but you have about five more minutes?

(Mark at 00:58:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:14) Okay. Because I wanna get some leadership questions here for you. So first question, I wanna know what are you learning right now as a leader?

(Mark at 00:58:24) You know, what's one of the big lessons—I think this is not gonna be a revolutionary statement, but COVID is definitely showing us something, right? It's showing us what really is truly important and important for different age groups, right? And so what is very clear to me right now is that while working from home is a great thing, and we talk about it, and there's some leaders out in the market who are saying, you know, we're never going back.

(Mark at 00:58:50) I just can't believe that. I just really can't believe that because there's still nothing better than being in person. There's just no better form. Nuances that are lost that we're just not there. Now, this is even more important for younger professionals, people in their twenties.

(Mark at 00:59:09) Their networks are forming. Right? Like, my network is pretty well established. I've been doing this for a while. You know, like, I could survive being remote.

(Mark at 00:59:18) I don't want to be, but I can survive. Some of the younger folks on my team — and I have a lot of brilliant, absolutely brilliant young people, just unbelievable. I'm super proud to have these people on my team, and they're incredible. And they need to be around other people of their age. I mean, there's just an element.

(Mark at 00:59:38) I mean, just whether it's learning from me, learning from their managers, learning from each other, creating those bonds, those relationships, those professional relationships, those bonds, the learning that you get. These are some pretty formative years professionally. Right? Just like your teens are your formative years socially. These are formative years for this group of folks.

(Mark at 01:00:00) And so I think one of the things I've learned recently is just how important it is to be in person for a specific age group. And I just don't buy into this that we're gonna be remote, you know, sort of like, that's just it. Like, we're never going back to the office. I just don't buy that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:15) I don't either. Yeah.

(Mark at 01:00:17) So I think that's been a really interesting observation. You know, I think one of the things that we've done which I've been very proud of is we have — you know, we have a weekly — we didn't do this pre-COVID. But in an attempt to try to just keep the team engaged, just simply getting on the Zoom and seeing faces, you know, is great. And so we have our weekly all-hands where we'll have sort of a, you know, whatever the topic of the day is. You know, today we had someone do a presentation on the low code, no code movement. That was our topic today. I mean, we're generally a pretty nerdy bunch. We're the product strategy team. So it's a series of intellectual academic types that you would need. So these topics are obviously on brand for this group. We also had another presenter talk about our multi-algorithm strategy for search, which is one of our big differentiators.

(Mark at 01:01:13) And so it was just something that we, you know, wanted to make sure the group is leveled on the talk track and the philosophies behind it. And, you know, that was about an hour. And then I do open Q&A after that with the team where I let anybody ask me any question. We use Slido. If you're familiar with the tool Slido — how do I describe Slido? It just lets people anonymously ask questions, and then you can, like, you know, sort of vote them up.

(Mark at 01:01:42) Oh, cool. Yeah. Well, there's a plug for Slido. We use that, and it's supposed to be — you know, a lot of it's about transparency. Right? It's like, I will answer the question. If someone asks a question — these are anonymous submissions, by the way. So, you know, people are a little more courageous when it's anonymous. And I will answer the question. I will 100% answer the question because I just think there's an element of transparency, especially right now, that is super important.

(Mark at 01:02:10) So, you know, engagement, transparency, constant education. So once again, it's a lot of — it's the type of employees you have. This is a group that's a smart group. They want to be intellectually stimulated everyday if they, you know? And so having these sort of educational sessions, sharing — you know, I believe the team appreciates it.

(Mark at 01:02:30) And I think they also appreciate the transparency. And I think that those are things that have always been important, but they've maybe been more important over the last nine months, whatever the timeline has been that we've been in this COVID world.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:44) No. I like that you mentioned that because no one's brought that up to me yet, this concept of doing, like, the anonymous polling. And I saw — I pulled it up real quick. It looks like it's got, like, a Zoom integration or it's really simple to do because, you know, you can sit there as a leader and say, yeah, ask your questions and not register with the fact that it's gonna be appearing next to their Zoom name.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:06) Right?

(Mark at 01:03:07) Yeah. That part is dangerous for me, but I think it's really special for the team because people are — if people are less likely to ask a question. And by the way, what's really interesting about a question is that you can tell a lot about the person's mindset by how they ask the question and the phrases. So for me, it gives me a great insight into how the team is feeling and where their heads are at. You know?

(Mark at 01:03:33) Because this is a tough time. I mean, it really is a tough time. You know, another tool that we've used are — we just call them basically their sort of recharge days. So what's interesting is, like, at tech companies, like all tech companies, you pretty much have unlimited, you know, vacation days. Right? You just do. It's like just sort of how it works. Because you're working a lot. So, like, no one, you know — we're very free with the vacation days. No one takes them, of course, because everyone's a workaholic.

(Mark at 01:03:58) So, you know, but that's their choice. That's their choice to take them or not take. What is really — what's funny is that what's really interesting is that taking a vacation is not a vacation sometimes. I mean, taking a day off is not a day off because the rest of the company is still moving. Your team is still moving. Your inbox is filling up. Your Slack is filling up. Like, it's stressful. It sort of, like, doesn't — because it doesn't really let you disconnect properly. Right?

(Mark at 01:04:24) And that's why the weekend is so special. Because in theory, people should not be sending Slack messages or emails, even though it's not true, but that's the idea. And so what we do is these coordinated sort of recharge days. Right? Where we'll say, okay, next Thursday. And it's always random. I try to make it random. You know? We're gonna take a day. The whole group. Just take a day. Just don't think about work. Go do something. You know?

(Mark at 01:04:55) And don't worry because when you come back, your inbox is not gonna be full because everyone else is also taking — is also not, you know, taking that day. And I think it's been a pretty effective tool through COVID. This is not something I would do outside of COVID. It's something that I think is very much like a COVID thing because people get burnt out pretty quickly. I definitely see burnout at a much higher rate than I've ever seen it for the team. The burnout is real. It's so real. And people don't know it's happening because it sort of happens, like, incrementally. It's like the boiling of a frog thing. Like, you don't — people are unaware it's happening, and all of a sudden, they'll be — you'll be talking to someone while we're talking with the team, and I'll be like, oh, man, it's happening. You know? Here we are. Okay. Day off.

(Mark at 01:05:35) Let's do it. And so that is a — it's a management tool to prevent burnout is really what it's become. And it's just something you have to wield at a much higher rate, I think, during this time. So —

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:49) I love it. I love when I hear things like that because it reminds me, like, why I love doing this podcast so much. When I just hear something that's like — it makes so much sense, and it's something that I've experienced too because I just took some time off, but my team didn't. And so it was — I could — I didn't — it was unfulfilling. It was stressful because I saw the Slack messages. I still wanted to jump in. You know, even though I have my notifications off and everything, I still wanted to check it because I know the team's going. And so this concept of recharge days is something I'm gonna broadcast and give you a lot of credit for because I haven't heard it before. And there's only — I love it when there's just, like, the slight nuance to what makes it work better than just giving a — an overworked team member that you felt in a one-on-one needs a day or two off, giving that to them. That's, like, the standard, you know, thought that's going around.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:44) But to have a team-wide, like, recharge day and to set it up with the context that it's a recharge day so that we don't — we aren't messaging each other. Right? All of that, I love that. We should — I want to put that in a — we're gonna clip that insight and put it in newsletter and stuff and push that out to the world because that's a really good one. I like that.

(Mark at 01:07:06) You really do have to force people. The first two — the first two ones we did, I had to, like — I don't want to say threaten because that's an aggressive word. I highly encourage people and told them that I was gonna be checking, that I was gonna be checking their email, checking Slack. Now, by the way, I actually have no technical way of doing that, so I sort of made up the fact that I was gonna be watching them. And — because, you know, I mean, if you love what you do, as almost everyone — I think most of us, luckily, we're most of us are blessed to like what we do, to enjoy what we do. You want to do it. And so it's hard for someone to stop, like, to get someone to stop. So it's almost like you gotta get them out of their own way. And so there was an element to those first few days where I was like — the first few times we did it, I was like — I was like, if I see one Slack message from any of you guys, you know, you're gonna be in trouble. And, like, I'm like — it was like one of those sort of things. Like, I think you have to go there because it's, like, you gotta make it seem like, you know, as the leader of the organization, like, you really are stressing that this has to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:09) You're exactly right. Yeah. You have to hit it home as the leader because your high achievers will want to see this as an opportunity to, like, scratch — Yeah.

(Mark at 01:08:18) They don't know how to turn off. They're superstars, but they don't know how to turn off. Yeah. And if you get a whole team of that, if you're lucky enough to have a whole team of that, then this day turns into not being a day. It doesn't have the effect, and so you really have to — if there had been a way for me to turn everything off — there probably is a way, some way, but I just, you know, it was too much effort — I would have done it. I would have definitely done it. But just simply the sort of making those statements was enough.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:46) We'll get Cal Henderson on the show and ask him for a recharge day button in Slack.

(Mark at 01:08:52) That would be good. You just gotta turn it off. It's really important.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:57) I'm getting goosebumps as you were talking about that, like, the high performers and superstars because there's a couple different stages that I'm looking back on in the progression of my career. And there was the stage where just, like, high performance at all cost, all of that, knowing that if I take a day off, I could recharge, but I'm not going to, knowing that there's a large benefit, then finally burning out to the max, taking a break, becoming back alive like a, you know, sponge soaking up water again, like, coming back to life. And then you do that enough, and then you get the — the knowledge of taking time off transitions into the wisdom of actually taking the time off.

(Mark at 01:09:39) That's a great turn of phrase. Yeah. It is. It's exactly right. It's like you have to have a couple of episodes where you maybe should have taken some time off and you didn't, and you were struggling with it. And then you see it work. And then as you get older, you just sort of, like — you start to know yourself better and know when you need it. And so that's why I think it goes back when you have a younger team, as most of us do in the tech space. We have younger teams. It's just sort of the demographic that it attracts. They're not there. They don't have that wisdom yet. You know? So you kind of have to help them find it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:13) Yeah. And you can't just tell them because it's like — it's like the kids. You can't just tell the kid to walk. You have to, like, watch them and coach them and, like, love them through the process of falling on their face and then help them get back up. Right? I like that a lot. Last question here before we wrap up. What is the best leadership advice that you have ever received?

(Mark at 01:10:34) That I've ever received. It's — career advice was the first thing that popped in my head, not leadership advice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:41) Either is fine. Whatever pops in your head is good.

(Mark at 01:10:43) Well, I think from a — you know, I'm a big fan of sort of, like, having a lot of diversity of experiences. I think it makes for — I think we're in a world now where multi-discipline — the world's too complex. Right? It's just incredibly complex. It's way more complex than it was, you know, ten, twenty, fifty years ago. And so to be good at your job, you have to understand the other disciplines that you engage with. And so I was very lucky in my career where I played — I wore many hats. You know, I've been a CEO, a CTO, a VP of engineering. I've been, you know, a head of products. I've been a CMO. You know, I've done a lot of jobs. And while I — I love product, product is my area of — you know, that's my love. But knowing and having done all those other roles makes me way better at my job than I did before. And so I always recommend, especially early on in your careers, to having a broad — I mean, I kind of — I mean, I carried a bag for one year, you know, and I was a salesperson when you're just doing it. I mean, a mentor of mine kind of was like, you should do this for a year. I did it, and I was terrified, by the way, just so you know. I was completely terrified. But I got, you know, I got out my C-MEGS, and I got there. I also learned from some of the best, you know, minds in — you know, they're out there. All of it has helped me be better at what I do.

(Mark at 01:11:57) So diversity of experience is really one of my biggest recommendations going on. From a leadership standpoint, you know, I think a lot of leaders — I think your job as a leader is to — it's not always to come up with the best idea. It's not to be the individual contributor. That's most people's, like, your natural inclination as a leader. They're like, I'm the leader, so I must come up with the excellent idea. No. Actually, if you're doing that, that's a bad thing. You're not running a team. You're running — it's like a — that's something else. That's a different —

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:31) Having a bunch of assistants and you're — Yeah.

(Mark at 01:12:33) It's like having, yeah, you know, 100 assistants or something. Right? And so a lot of it is, you know, asking people, you know, what can I do to make your job easier? What can I do to get these things out of the way? I have this conversation with my directs all the time. You know, what do you need me — you know, what nonsense is happening in your organization that you need me to clear the path on? You know? And a lot of it is also, like, so — so don't focus on coming up with the idea. Enable the crap out of everyone around you. Everyone who works for you. Enable them, whether it be with skills, with people, with just organizationally, you know, because I'm in a position where I can make things happen in the organization quickly, much quicker than they can. Right? And so let me use that the best I can. So I think that's a big part from a leadership standpoint.

(Mark at 01:13:24) I think providing a clear vision is really important, and then communicating and over-communicating that vision is definitely really important. And I think the most important thing is don't take any credit ever. Give all the credit to the people that work for you all the time. This is not about credit and you're a leader. It's the people that work for you.

(Mark at 01:13:50) They're the ones who deserve the credit. They're the ones who are doing the work. You know, each one of them has their specific area that they're working on, and they're spending 100% of their time on it. I'm bouncing between multiple initiatives during the course of the day, as is our CEO, as is anyone in this level of leadership. There's no way, like, even when I'm focused on the next thing, they're still on that thing.

(Mark at 01:14:13) They're still on that initiative. And so they do deserve the credit. They do deserve the accolades for what they've accomplished. And so giving those accolades, giving that credit does not diminish in any way, shape, or form from you as a leader. Actually, I think it builds you up as a leader.

(Mark at 01:14:29) I think people appreciate it. And I think it's also a better representation of what's actually happening. Right? It just is. And so I think there's an element of that.

(Mark at 01:14:41) I guess this is my fourth piece of advice.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:51) Keep going, man.

(Mark at 01:14:52) Yeah. Understand the difference between leadership and management. They are not the same thing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:51) Break it down for me.

(Mark at 01:14:52) Well, I mean, management is the way, as I look at it, is someone who is making sure all the performance reviews are filled out and kind of tracking the project plan, making sure everyone has their performance review, going through the process of comp reviews and everything. That's a manager. That's managing a group of people, making sure they're on the right path. A leader is someone who is articulating a vision, right? Is putting out a mode of operation, a way of living, a way of being—how you should treat each other, how you should treat people inside the organization, how we should operate, what are the standards that we hold ourselves to. And ultimately, what are we doing here?

(Mark at 01:15:53) Like, what are we doing? Right? And a leader, ultimately, a good leader is someone who, even if there wasn't a company around them to make these people show up every day, these people would still follow them. They'd still follow. And that is, those are two different things.

(Mark at 01:16:07) The CEO, for example, traditionally is not a manager. That is a leadership role. They lead more than they manage, and that's what they should be doing. Right? And so I think there's an element of that—there's two distinctly different things. And I've just watched it through the years. I've just watched people who are very good at one or the other. You know, I've rarely seen anyone who's good at both, by the way, just so you know. I actually think they're orthogonal concepts. I think there'll never be someone who's good at both because they're just sort of opposing concepts in many ways.

(Mark at 01:16:39) You know, one is sort of about the details, and the other thing is about the bigger picture. They're not always—they contradict each other on the inside of a person. So it's a—these are just things, I think, as you get older, you start to recognize. You know, it's also, I just feel like the natural mind of the engineer is—I mean, I'm constantly breaking things down to its atomic level because that's just how I understand the world and how it feels comfortable to me.

(Mark at 01:17:03) I run a team of people who think the exact same way, sort of constantly abstracting and breaking things down. And so, you know, maybe we might have more of these than maybe the average person in sort of breaking down the interactions between people and dynamics of the team into their component parts. And my group as a whole, there's a set of people in the world who are the people that build the race car, and then there's the other set of people who drive the race car. Right? And the sooner you know who you are, you're going to know which one you are.

(Mark at 01:17:33) And so I have a group of people who like to build things. We are the builders of things. That is what we do. And that is the easiest way to describe who we are and what we like. I just feel like there's certain people who are builders. And if you like getting into this stuff and you like technology and you like seeing how things work, then you are a builder of things. It's just sort of the way. Yes, can builders operate? Yes, they can.

(Mark at 01:17:56) But they don't really like to. They do it almost as a way to go back to building. You know, they're like, well, I know if I want to build what I want to build, I have to also operate. So fine, I'll do this operational thing. It's super not interesting to me. And then there's people I know at the organization, you know, Yext and other companies, who are just phenomenal operators. You know, I mean, some of the sales leaders that I've worked with through the years who were ex-Salesforce guys who are now with me at this company—they're just some of the most incredible operators.

(Mark at 01:18:25) They're just really good at running things. But I always look at it as I say, I will build it for you, and you're going to run it like a champ. You know? And I think it's important that you know that about yourself. I think that's just a tough thing. Not a lot of people figure that out early on. Right? They figure it out sometimes later on, or they just sort of conflate the two together and not realize, like, man, you'd be much happier if you just acknowledge who you are.

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:51) Self-awareness, man. It's an amazing thing.

(Mark at 01:18:54) Yeah. But it only comes with later in life. That's the worst part about it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:58) Yeah, and it comes slowly. And the pattern that I picked up on is, I feel for the rest of my life, I will always look back ten years and be like, that person knew nothing.

(Mark at 01:19:11) That's probably a good thing for the rest of it. Yeah. If you were saying that your entire life, it's probably not a bad thing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:18) Right? It's like people who, every new product they make, they're like, oh, that old code I wrote was garbage. That previous product was no good. And for some reason, that's the sign that the individual is learning and growing throughout their process.

(Mark at 01:19:34) Could you imagine if you said it the other way? You're just like, I was so much smarter ten years ago. I don't know. It's like, yeah, where'd I go wrong?

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:45) That's a wake-up call for somebody, though.

(Mark at 01:19:47) Yeah. That's a good test there. That's a good life test for yourself. I like that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:52) Well, my friend, this is great. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Mark at 01:19:56) I feel good. It was a conversation. You know, it was a good conversation. Thank you very much. You were terrific. I also immensely enjoyed the conversation. You know, I love that you're in Florida.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:07) Yep.

(Mark at 01:20:07) It's good to know there's like-minded people in Florida.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:11) There's good people in Florida.

(Mark at 01:20:14) Correct. So far I have found it really good. Yeah, really terrific. So it's been great. Yeah, so I think it's been great. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:24) We'll put the link for the demo or the free trial for Yext in the show notes. We'll put your link and information all in there as well so people can go actually explore, build an answer, check out the Hitchhikers. So we got Hitchhikers, the sign-up link so they can get a demo, and then your information and bio. We'll put all those things in the show notes so people can go follow up and play around with the answers and help structure the world's data.

(Mark at 01:20:51) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:52) All right, my friend.

(Mark at 01:20:53) All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:55) Thank you. Talk soon, Mark.

(Mark at 01:20:57) All right. Take it easy.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:01) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.