Why Your Document Workflows Are a Hidden Compliance Crisis with Anand Narasimhan, CTO at S-Docs

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Anand Narasimhan, CTO at S-Docs, the sponsor of today's episode. This one is all about the hidden compliance issues throughout your document workflows. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) You were at Salesforce for a while, and then subsequently, S-Docs is actually built on top of Salesforce. Do I understand that correct?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:00:28) That's correct. It's built on Salesforce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) How did that come about?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:00:32) So, obviously, my time at Salesforce—I spent 15 years there, which in this day and age is a long time—and I spent the formative years of Salesforce at Salesforce. And through that time, I've seen enterprise customers. I've had a front row seat to the CRM revolution, the cloud revolution, and I've seen front row what customers struggle with. Salesforce certainly does a great job at many things, but it also built this amazing platform. And a little bit of trivia—I don't know if this is popular knowledge—but App Store, the iPhone's marketplace, was originally copyrighted by Marc Benioff. He actually owned the trademark for the name App Store, but Marc had such a huge respect for Steve Jobs that he actually gave the App Store trademark to Apple, and then he went on to start AppExchange, which is Salesforce's marketplace. So, wow, little bit of trivia that maybe is not common knowledge, but something that Marc did way back when. And he was an intern at Apple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) Was it the App Store at Salesforce and then he gave it over, or was it before Salesforce even?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:01:53) I mean, he came up with the idea of a marketplace, and he wanted to call it the App Store. And then he saw that Apple was creating this, and he gave the App Store name to Apple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Hence Salesforce AppExchange.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:02:04) Did Marc used to work at Apple?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) He was an intern at Apple.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:02:07) Oh, he was?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) Okay. Yeah. Cool. I haven't met Marc. I know Parker.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:02:11) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) He's a cool guy, but I don't know Marc.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:02:16) Parker's a smart dude. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) So you were—were you working at S-Docs, and then were you part of the founding team here, or did you go over to the founding team?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:02:25) Okay. Yeah. So I came in much later. So the founder was also at Salesforce, and much like me, he saw some of these common problems. And then he took the leap of faith, went all entrepreneurial, built the company early on, and then saw the initial success. And then it got to a point where they needed to kind of get the innovative genius, if I can call myself that, and come up with the one that can scale us and take us to the next level. And, you know, I joined about three and a half years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) How have you guys grown in the past three and a half years?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:03:02) Our growth's been pretty good. Right? It's on par with what we see with SaaS companies. Obviously, the economy is kind of going in and out, and AI is kind of throwing a huge wrinkle in pretty much everyone's business, like ours. But I think we're well poised for that, partly because of what we do for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) And so what is that? Can you tell me exactly what you guys do?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:03:27) That's a great question. So I call ourselves a document automation company, and there's three facets to it. But at the outset, the core part is driving efficiency for operations teams, whether that's sales ops, rev ops, service ops, biz ops, if you were to put the bigger umbrella. Right? There's two major components to document automation. Right? One is document generation. All of us need to send contracts, NDAs, invoices, quotes. And in this day and age, you don't want to have them manually hand-type this data sitting in CRM. So we kind of have this templating platform that merges the data from Salesforce, generates the document, sends it to its destination. On top of that, we add e-signature because you have contracts, you have orders, order forms, whatever. So we tack on e-signature on top of that. So we get document generation, e-signature, both combined into one unified solution. And our start was exclusively with Salesforce, so we were an exclusive Salesforce partner. And one of the unique things we could, which continues to be a big advantage for us, is what we're called—what is a native application. So most of you have used a calculator, and you've used a calculator app on the phone. So if you're on your iPhone, the calculator app doesn't send the data out to another server, calculate it, and send it back. It does it right inside your phone. So we are like the calculator app in the sense that our app lives completely inside Salesforce. And because of that, the data does not leave Salesforce. So if you are a highly regulated healthcare manufacturing company, you're not sending clinical trial data out to some server. It's all running inside a very trusted infrastructure of Salesforce. And we continue to be that kind of architecture, and that's called a native application in Salesforce. And we're truly native, which means I actually don't own any infrastructure to run our service for our Salesforce customers. So a little bit of architecture, technology, but also kind of what we do for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:43) That's pretty interesting, actually. So from a sales process, that makes—well, from sales and implementation, they kind of both—it's a win on both. So if you're selling into one of these companies and they already have—well, they already have Salesforce, they don't have to go through this whole process of recertifying and getting all the approvals.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:06:01) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:02) Interesting. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good, nice little observation.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:06:05) And public sector, for example, the U.S. federal government—we have a lot of federal government clients. Some of them are high security customers. They do not want their data to leave the U.S. security boundary. And because Salesforce is already approved and they've got armies of people looking at this, we are within that security boundary, which is very, very enterprising and attractive to our public sector customers, state and local customers as well. Right? Because there's high data sovereignty. Think about someone in Germany. Hey, data can't leave the soil of Germany. Well, if the data center for Salesforce is in Germany, then S-Docs is compliant with all your German laws with no additional thousand hurdles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) I also see that as maybe the trend in software development as a whole. I think that as the data sets get bigger, we're going to bring the applications to the data versus the data being piped out. I think that's—so you're in the right area.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:07:02) Yeah. I mean, we're close to Salesforce, and of course, Salesforce is one of many CRMs in the ecosystem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:10) So you have other...

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:07:11) So we do have. About a year and a half ago, we ventured into other platforms. So we started with HubSpot, being the number two CRM in the market. And so we do have S-Docs for HubSpot, which architecturally is slightly different because HubSpot doesn't have this concept of native in their architecture. And then we also have an S-Docs for anything, meaning we can basically generate and sign documents from as simple as a Google spreadsheet to as complex as a SAP platform. We can just be a horizontal across the entire enterprise and, you know, serve all your needs, not just Salesforce, not just HubSpot, but any platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) As an individual user, I noticed my personal Gmail or Google Doc thing for my personal account—it asked me the other day. It said they had some acquisition, and they're like, do you want to get this document signed? And I was like, oh, wow. Google was late to the signature party. Right? Right? I mean, that just happened for me.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:08:18) Right. We've been asked that question a few times. Like, hey, Google's got e-signature. Why do I need yours? Right? So and then this goes to a little bit of our approach to documents. So if you've signed contracts, right, usually it's a PDF. You get a Word document as a draft. You maybe make some changes, send it back. They make some changes, send it back, and the email attachment games go on. And there's version 2.0_Joel_02-12-2026. Right? Underscore worst. Right? Yeah. The whole...

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:51) Underscore V2.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:08:52) Underscore V2, V22, 2022. It just goes on and on. Right? And our hypothesis is that both Word and PDF are amazing mediums. They are the most shared mediums. I often joke—this I don't know how true this is, but I saw this in a meme, but I'll say this—someone typed in, "How do I convert," and then Google's autofill or autocomplete came with two religions, I think Hindu, Christianity, whatever, and then the third was actually PDF. So PDF's like the third most popular religion. So I often joke about that. But these are great mediums. They've existed for, I want to say, half a century right now. But the problem with both of these are disconnected mediums. So as soon as you download a document and send it, that document is just—is detached from the data. You generated it from Salesforce. You made a change to Salesforce. That document doesn't change itself. You regenerate it, copy-paste, you know, all the human errors that we do. Right? So our hypothesis is that a document has layers. Right? It has a data layer. It has a security layer. It has an approval layer, a collaboration layer. And as long as you can keep those layers intact and provide the ability—so going back to the question about Google, yeah, sure, it's integrated to Google. You can add a signature field. But if you want data from a Google spreadsheet, what if you want data from Salesforce? How do you do that in Google? You probably cannot. That's where platforms like us come in because we make it super easy to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) Is it a Google Doc where it's alive? Is that what you're describing? It's a live doc.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:10:40) It's a live doc. So, in fact, we get heavily inspired by Google Docs because it's actually a pretty good document editing platform, and a lot of our inspiration comes from Google Docs. I almost say to my internal folks, we're like Google Docs, but a lot more beyond it, like Google Docs on steroids in the sense that we have the data layer, we have the approval layer, we have the security layer, and we have the collaboration layer altogether.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) Yeah. I mean, Google Docs is great for what it is, but it's not your competitor for this.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:11:12) It's not our competitor. System and, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're a small shop that wants to send one or two contracts, you're probably better off doing Google Docs. But if you have a lot of data, you have a lot of templates, you have a lot of times in contracts, you want your lawyers to, hey, you cannot touch these four paragraphs. No one can touch these paragraphs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) I know. I know.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:11:33) You cannot do that in Google Docs. Whereas in ours, you can actually lock sections down and say, no one can touch this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:39) Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So you can unlock the areas that are open for configuration or negotiation.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:11:45) Yeah. Word and PDF don't offer that as a medium.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) Oh, they don't offer it at all?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:11:50) I mean, you cannot lock sections in a Word document. You either ship the document or you don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:53) Yeah. I try to stay out of Word documents. Yes. I've tried to stay away from that. I've tried to move everything in my life into Google Docs because it's got the—mostly because it's almost never do I have a document that won't need to be edited. Everything I do, it's like, this is the beginning. The first time I share it, that's the first—we're gonna change that a whole lot. You know?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:12:20) Exactly. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) So I looked through all the preparation for this conversation, and I picked out a couple things here and there that I thought really interested me. And you did a survey. Correct? State of Document Workflows and Compliance Risk. And then you sent that out to a bunch of different IT compliance operation leaders. And it was mostly regulated industries? That's where your sweet spot is for the customers. Right?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:12:47) I think it was a mix of every one of our customers, but our responses might have been maybe skewed. But I think—I don't know the exact details, but I think it was probably to every one of our customers and prospects. I don't think it was specific to one industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) Okay. Cool. And then what did you learn? One of the things that I saw that was exciting for me was that organizations paid an average of $94,000 in compliance penalties last year due to documentation error. And my first thought was, how does that happen?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:13:18) Well, I mean, think about it. And I'm shocked, even today when I jump on and talk to customers about this. I'm shocked at how manual processes are. People still to date go to a SharePoint site or a Google Drive, download a template, usually end up picking the wrong template because the template was updated. They have version 2026 latest, version 2026 January, you know, whatever. Right? People have version problems. People love to create copies and make changes because they think that's the best way to version, even though Google actually has versioning, and so does Word and Office 365, but people still have different naming conventions. But more specifically, you choose the wrong template. You choose the wrong template, then, again, how do you get the data in? People copy-paste data, fat-finger stuff. Add one extra zero, and that could mean you going to President's Club versus you not meeting your quota. Right? So this is shocking. We're in 2025 and talking about AI. It is shocking how many enterprises—I'm not talking about small, medium business companies. I am talking about large enterprises that do this still manually, and it is so shocking. So if you do that, you fat-finger one little thing in a regulated industry where you have to file a patient claim waiver form and you miss or add an extra zero to their birth date and it's wrong, the penalties are very, very serious. Right? That's what that $94,000 is talking about is people make these mistakes because it's just humans doing this. There is absolutely no automation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:09) So if that net number of $94,000 in compliance penalties, that's for a specific corporation?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:15:16) It's for one company on average. Right? So we just looked at all of that and said, on average, that's the cost of having a compliance error in your documentation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) Interesting. Interesting. The other one that really stood out to me, I kind of liked it. I'm a fan of shadow IT. But 57% of employees bypass official tools when under deadline pressure. Come on. They're just being entrepreneurs, my friend.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:15:42) Very true. Right? Like, hey, when you need to send a contract and it's 11 p.m. and your quarter closes 12 a.m., what are you gonna do? Download, make some changes? Hey, here's the contract. Legal, I'll deal with you later. Right? But the reality of it is that once it becomes a signed contract, you can't go back on a lot of things. Right? This happens, and I saw this to an extent frontline, always kind of hearing customers talk to me about their Salesforce needs and requirements when I was at Salesforce. It's like, yeah, this is our contracts process. Anyone can go to make any changes.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:16:17) It's a nightmare. Obviously, people are motivated by the most motivating thing, which is money, and they want to do what's fastest and easiest, not put more roadblocks. And from a compliance perspective, that's very hard. And the flip side most companies do not ask is, okay, so if you're doing it manually, what can we do to automate it? And most companies ask it like, yeah, we'll get to it.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:16:41) We'll get to it, and it never gets to it. And then they pay the expensive fines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) I wonder if the fines are cheaper than fixes.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:16:49) Sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Are you guys a solution to this? Do you sell to that solution?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:16:53) Yeah, we do. Right? So for one of the things, and this is not covered per se in the report, but what we have seen is I want to say about 80 to 90% of our customers, when they bring us into the evaluation phase, the number one thing they say is like, hey, guys, my sales reps don't want to be clicking buttons to manage this. I want this to be smart, intelligent, and it should just do its job without my sales rep having to lift a finger. And long story short, what most people come down to is I want to be able to automate my document processes, not be able to still depend on humans. Right? So a large part of our business is actually automation, which has been amazing to see because if you automate it, then you're not worrying about, did I choose the right template? Did I actually do the right things? Did I include the right legal clauses for a company in Singapore that has privacy laws? Those things are not the things that your reps are asking. As long as the data is in Salesforce or my source accurately, everything is driven off that. Now if the data in Salesforce being accurate is a completely different story that, again, I've seen front row, that I could talk hours and days about that, but we'll digress from the core topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:21) You need some good, nerdy SDRs that just want things clean and nice to work with the AEs to get everything.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:18:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) Yeah. I have found the best salespeople are the worst with technology. And I know everyone says that, and I've heard everyone say it for years, but it wasn't until I started my own business and started hiring salespeople that I was like, okay, I get it.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:18:39) Yep. They're not fans of putting in data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) No. Just talk to the people, close the deal, get your commission check. Let's move on.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:18:48) Move on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) And of course, check the... Well, let's automate the compliance. We'll automate the compliance. That's exactly right. I love it. I love it. So you did this report, right, or you did the survey. And I'm curious. You got to read the results. You've been in the industry for a long time. You're at Salesforce. You're no stranger. Did anything stand out to you as surprising? Were you surprised by any of the results?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:19:11) I think what was not surprising is that the sheer number of companies not automating and still being very manual. I think people are penny wise, pound foolish, if I can say that. But what was surprising to me was people have not even thought about what does automation mean for them. And I think partly because people think because there's humans doing this, we'll rely on them and trust that they're doing their jobs. And when they don't do their jobs, we go yell at them, for lack of better words. But I think they've become so dependent on the tribal knowledge, the people, and the process that they have forgotten that technology can actually be an accelerator, and it can also be a compliance monitor of sorts, right, which is very important in the regulated industries. That to me was shocking, especially in large enterprises where I was like, really? You spend millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on, quote unquote, frivolous stuff, and you don't actually think about automating? You only have taken the step to document the automation possibility, leave alone implement. That was actually the biggest surprise for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) Yeah. Well, I mean, it's exciting to make big purchases.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:20:37) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) One of the things I was curious about is the one about the health care leaders reporting data leaks from documentation errors. So I don't... I'm not in this space. My companies have never gotten over 30 people, and they were never in a sensitive industry. How do you identify and report a data leak? What does that even look like?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:21:01) Well, I mean, think about, again, this goes back to the medium. Right? So today, a bulk of documents are shared as attachments, as things in an email, people text it, take screenshots. Well, people can always take screenshots. I don't think we're going to avoid that. But attachments is kind of like the bane of all this existence. Right? You send a document, it's sent wrong, and you send it over an attachment. And email, as much as it is so ubiquitous, is the most unsecure, nonsecure platform. Anyone can get into your email. If you don't want them to get into your email, well, guess what? In regulated industries and if the government has reasons, they can get into your email. We've all seen that. Right? So I think that's the beginning, and then people think that they're sending it to their work email, accidentally send it to their personal email. Human mistakes happen all the time. Emails get hacked. Personal devices get hacked. And all of this, when you have sensitive documents sitting in email, are basically vectors for leaks. And when that document has data that is considered PII, that's kind of like the tip of the iceberg, and then the entire Jenga box starts to fall down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) Is this happening a lot?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:22:20) Yeah. I mean, it's happening a lot. I think people are getting very creative. If you've seen the news about SalesLoft, Salesforce, companies like Google, Farmers Insurance, all of them are getting hacked. And people are getting very, very sophisticated about this. So it's all over. And when people know you have some precious data, they're out to get you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) Yes. I was explaining that to my wife on signal versus noise because I was showing her some of these videos of... You've seen these YouTube influencer hacker guys that'll go around, and they'll do interviews with large podcast hosts, and they'll show them the different ways they can get into your devices and grab your stuff. And I was showing it to my wife, and she's like, this is crazy. She's like, we're not safe. I was like, no. No. Exactly. It's... We've got the signal, the noise. We're kind of hiding in there. It's so profitable to go after these other entities that have so much more gold that that's where all the energy is being expended. And as long as we lay low and stay a little bit anonymous, everything will be fine.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:23:24) Yes. Well, they'll come for you. In this day and age of AI, there is an AI bot coming for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) There is an AI bot coming for me. Luckily, they're currently constrained by energy and compute cost.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:23:37) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:37) I know it's very cheap, but they can't get everybody all the time. That's right. Is this connected at all to operational confidence? I know you were talking a little bit about that.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:23:46) I think so. I think part of operational efficiency is not about just automating, but it's also all these guardrails that you have to put in place. How do you audit? Who created the document? When was it created? Who sent it? Where did you send it? Where did it go? And if you don't have a very detailed audit trail of this, then should you have a data breach and should you be taken to the court of law and litigated, you have little to no backing to actually say, hey, we've done our part. This was actually the customer that leaked it because their email got hacked. Because then you don't have a defensible way of saying, well, it was not us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) And so do you measure this operational confidence as a goal?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:24:31) We try to push hard on efficiency as the measure. I think that the confidence is qualitative and quantitative. I think the quantitative piece of this is more on throughput. In the sales world, if you're a rev ops team, it's deal velocity, things like that. So it varies by industry, varies by the domain, but I think it's more around the efficiency that you can track it. Confidence is more of a qualitative metric, which is almost like a lagging metric, if you will. The leading metric is usually things like velocity and deal velocity and that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) Improving for a long period of time, then you develop the confidence.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:25:09) Exactly. Yeah. So it's kind of a lagging metric in that sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) So this automation that helps with the velocity of the deals?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:25:16) I mean, automation's a core part of it. Right? You know, we're in this day and age of AI when I'm sure many CTOs and CIOs are like, well, to hell with automation. Let's just go autonomous. That's the future. Right? I mean, I'm sure every day...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:34) GPT can do the HIPAA forms and everything. Yeah.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:25:37) Yeah. Sure. Right? But you're opening the keys to your castle. It's insane what it can do. I mean, if you've been reading about the... I don't know what it's called now, but Moldbook, OpenClaw, ClawBot. Everyone's like, oh, yeah, I'll give access to my bank account. I'm like, do you realize what you're doing? You're just giving access to things that you would not let your kids have access to. So you're letting agents that have no supervision. So in this day and age of AI, people think like, yeah, we'll just need no people and just do all this. And, you know, I actually recently posted on LinkedIn about this, and I'm going to be talking about this next week to a Salesforce ecosystem. But everyone talks about autonomous, but what everyone needs to realize is autonomous starts with automation. If you don't have your automation well defined and implemented, autonomous is not really going to make much difference because it's, for lack of better words, lipstick on a pig.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:43) The automation forces you to take your human workflow and put it into words or code, which is the instruction that an LLM could use. Exactly. You're not going to get around it. You might as well fix it, and it's actually so much harder to debug stuff with the LLM doing it.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:27:03) 100% right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) At least that's my experience. Yeah.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:27:06) I mean, if you don't have the codebooks to say, here's all the guardrails, those guardrails are your automation definitions. Yeah. We need the spec stock, you know, whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:14) Everyone calls it something different. I haven't heard of OpenClaw. I did a quick Google search when you mentioned it. Tell me, have you played with this? What is this?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:27:20) I have not. For obvious security reasons, I have not. This was... It's called Moldbook now. I think they have a social media for agents to talk to each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33) Just Google OpenClaw.ai, which is like a...

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:27:36) That is that. Yeah. So, apparently, it can run on a Mac Mini, and it's very powerful where you can download it, you can do this, and then you can set up agents to run inside your Mac Mini. And it can do a whole lot of things. Go look at my calendar, plan my day, decline these meetings, summarize this, log in to my bank account, send this money over. All this completely autonomous. And I'm like, yeah, I am not touching this with a ten foot pole at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:05) It's going to be... It's Tesla autopilot. It's going to be a slow adoption.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:28:12) I own a Tesla, and I love the autopilot and the FSD. But I was afraid of doing it initially, but then I gave it a little bit. I would drive a mile. I'm like, oh, this is pretty good. I'm not saying that it's the best thing and it does the right thing every time, but for the most part...

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:28) It gets it right a lot.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:28:29) Yeah. It's more safer than humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) It's my favorite car. Yeah. I've had one for just over a year now, and I'm driving 70% on autopilot. And it's great. It handles all the situations. It's very similarly to me, but you still remember it's a robot when it does it. Well, we're like, the other... Oh, this happened last week. I was date night with my wife. And the light was not on yet. The stoplight was still under construction. It hadn't been turned on. And it noticed right as it got to it that there was a stoplight that was technically out, and it just slammed on the brakes. My wife's like...

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:29:08) Oh...

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:09) Yeah. That was the... That was one of the very few times it's ever, like, let me down in a big way. Yeah.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:29:16) So yeah, I mean, people like, it's going to be a slow thing. I think the concept behind OpenClaw, I think, is going to be the future. Our kids are not going to be looking at devices. They're probably going to have devices do things for them autonomously and then let them know, who knows, they might have an embedded chip in their heads. Got it. That's right. So I think the concept... The concept of what OpenClaw is aiming for makes sense. I think we as humans from a maturity standpoint are just not ready for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:51) If you go look at any teenager, go to Subway, get a sandwich, I go look at a teenager, almost all of them have AirPods in one ear. Yep. They have it. They're already connected in.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:30:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) They're just walking around all day listening into the next thing. And then now instead of it just being a media consumption tool, they're going to be able to... An input. Yes. And you can see it. You know? Siri does it very poorly, very early days.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:30:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) Where it'll tell you you've got an incoming call or a text message or something. But it's going to become very similar, I think, to this OpenClaw thing.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:30:27) It's crazy. What the world? I'm a little scared, to be very honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) I'm fine with it.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:30:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:33) I... It's scary because we don't know it, and it's going to... It's going to change humanity, man.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:30:39) It's going to... It will. It's a little bit of the fear of the unknown than anything else. I'm a technologist. I love the technology. It's what people tend to take it and do with it and the crazier things. When FSD launched, you had people that were sleeping and putting FSD on. People, and they were putting Instagram videos about them. Are you really kidding me? That is making it extremely unsafe. That is not what it was meant for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) We've got to have test dummies. So, OpenClaw. We'll move on from that. But just curious, what is one thing that you think that it can do today that you might use it for? Maybe booking some travel or something. I'm not giving a bank account access.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:31:24) Yeah. I think research maybe. I want to plan this trip. Or company research, competitive research. Things that are public information that I just want you to go fan out to.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:31:37) I think Claude and Gemini and OpenChat GPT and all of these do a great job. So I honestly don't know. I'm actually more fearful of just it having access to things on my computer that would otherwise compromise me in general.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:53) And they're all—all the cloud services are already creeping into what OpenCloud is doing anyways.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:31:57) Oh, yes. Yeah. They have a lot of agents running locally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) Yeah. I just recently, Claude connected my personal Google account.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:32:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) So now it can create docs from the artifacts. So if I get something where I want it, I just click a button and it's a—which is great because I was copying and pasting it into a Google Doc when it was done, and it was losing formatting, and it was very frustrating. So I said, "Ah, this is—" I didn't love giving Anthropic access to my drive, but at the same time, I really didn't want to copy and paste and reformat every time I use a doc.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:32:33) Yeah. I mean, Google has all of their AI integrated. I can summarize and do all this. I think it all comes down to if you can make it easy and make my life easier, I'm gonna do it, but I still will be questioning the security of it. People store passwords in their personal emails.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:32:55) Wait. People do what? They store—they email themselves their passwords. "This is my password," right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) Do they understand how email works?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:33:04) Yeah, exactly, right? So you're literally one cyberattack away from giving away your bank account.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:13) That's why—no. Yeah, I use password managers.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:33:17) People don't, right? They have—old people. My dad's 84. My mom's 75. They are past me teaching them how to use password managers. So my mom actually writes it down in a notebook.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) That's actually the most secure.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:33:32) Yeah. Old school. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Oh, that's interesting. So from this report, I did have another couple of things highlighted that I was curious to talk about. 56% said their compliance team actively resist automation. That doesn't sound like every IT person I know. Most of the people I'm around in IT are like, let's do it. Let's automate it. Let's make it more better.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:33:57) I think—so I had a CTO for a large CRM company—blanking on who this was. But I'll kind of draw a parallel to this in AI. The world's developers are freaking out that AI is gonna take our jobs. I think what people don't realize is it's gonna take your job and give you a better one. And I think the resistance comes from a place of fear that their jobs are gonna get eliminated. What I think people don't realize is automation creates space and efficiency for you to do higher value tasks, right? Just a metric that, again, I don't know if most people know—in the sales world, this is a metric that Salesforce shared in their State of Sales report. 72% of a salesperson's time is spent on non-selling stuff. 72%. Just do the math on that per week, per month, per year. And if automation can take that 72% and make it 60% or 50%, think about how much more selling I'm doing and how much more I can hit my top line. That's the difference. And I don't think people connect the dots. Their immediate reaction as humans is like, "Oh, I'm gonna be out of a job." And I think that translation needs to happen. It needs to come from top down. It needs to come from validation and proof that this is actually here to supercharge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:30) Let's say I'm a direct report of yours. And I come to you. I say, "Hey, all the tasks and all the responsibilities that I have as a bullet point for my job description, I've successfully automated them. I'm sorry. I'll go home. You never wanna see me again." How do you respond to that? How do you—is that how you think it goes down? What would actually happen if an employee came and was like, "I've just automated every—there's nothing left for me to do." What would you do? Would you fire them?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:35:58) Um, well, I mean, I would challenge them in a couple ways, right? One is, if you thought what's in your job description is what you were required to do, then probably you're not the right person that I hired. Because usually—and this is what I see in a lot of people when I hire—is what is their uncomfortable zone, and are they comfortable to be uncomfortable? So if you're automating everything that you did, get uncomfortable with what else you can do that is beyond the scope of what you have, and what are the opportunities to take that and make it efficient. If you could come to me and say, "Hey, I automated my job, but I also automated things around it. Now the company is actually more efficient." I'm gonna give them a promotion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) Yes, right?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:36:43) So that's the difference. And I think people say, "Well, I don't wanna do this because I may lose my job. Well, I did this, and I am not relevant anymore." But what else can you do now? So I see opportunity when someone comes to me and says, "I've automated things."

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:56) Absolutely. So if I was your director for IT, I came, I said, "Hey, I automated everything in my job that I'm doing on day to day," you would give me a promotion and then give me opportunity to go automate all my jobs?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:37:05) I'll say, "What else is out there that you can automate that can bring and drive efficiency?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:09) Yeah. Which is the exact opposite of the fear that everyone has. The fear has, if I automate everything I do and I come to you, you're gonna tell me that's it. Go home. You're not gonna do that. You're gonna do the opposite of that. You're gonna give them more opportunity.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:37:24) Yeah. I mean, you think about adversity, right? People think about adversity as a problem, and they try to run away from it. But adversity brings opportunity. I look at it the same way. Automation brings opportunity. What type of leader are you? That is a brilliant question. I'm gonna give you a story and maybe ask you a question. Okay. Yeah. So, I don't know if you're a history buff, but are you familiar with Julius Caesar and Alexander? The characters, I guess?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:57) The names, yeah. Don't quiz me, but the names. Yes.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:37:59) So who do you like, Julius Caesar or Alexander?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:05) I don't know enough about both of them, to be honest with you.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:38:09) So the reason I ask—and, you know, I do this with a lot of my interviewing as well. If someone asked me that question, I would say I like Alexander, right? Both of these were prolific leaders in their own regard. Julius Caesar, head of the Roman Empire, was probably conquering the entire world at some point in time. Alexander, same thing, had he conquered the entire world or at least most parts of the world. But there was a subtle difference in how they actually led, which is a big—I shouldn't say subtle difference, but there was a big difference in how they led that drove them to the same success point. Julius Caesar was a strategist, and he was actually a top-down leader and strategized on many things that his teams executed. Absolutely a quality the leader should have. On the flip side, Alexander was mudslinging and fighting with his troops in the ground, right? He led by example. So I am more of a servant leader, an Alexandrian leader, if I can call it that, because I would love—I sit with my troops. I'm with my teams. I'm helping them think. I am hands down getting my hands dirty, doing sometimes the wrong things and learning from it. And the example that I try to drive from there is mistakes are okay. It's completely fine to fail, and you can pick yourself up and go. So there is no "too big to fail" kind of situations. And that, to me—so my long answer to your question is I am a servant leader, and I take pride in that because I embrace my teams together. And, hopefully, I'm imparting some knowledge and experience to them as part of being with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:56) Are you guys mostly remote or mostly in person?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:39:58) So we're hybrid. So my engineering team is hybrid. They're in the Michigan area two or three times a week. We have a small office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But my sales teams are all over. I'm remote. I'm in New Jersey. So hybrid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Very cool. And so what is getting in with the teams look like? Is it meetings? Are you doing remote meetings? Are you getting them together in person? What does that look like?

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:40:28) So I try to go there in person once a month, kind of be with the team, invariably meet them with company offsites, planning meetings, and all that. So invariably, I'm there more often than I would want to. And then we also try to get the teams together for summer town halls and offsites and go to some destinations that add some fun to their work, and it's not just work, work, work. There's a little bit of fun too. So kind of mix it up a bit. We have—we sponsor events as part of our various platforms, so that gives us an opportunity to kind of go and mingle with our colleagues.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:05) I like that you were intentional about looking for examples and that you study history to find leadership. I haven't done a lot of history that far back as far as leadership. Most of my leadership history is with people who were alive when I was alive. So a lot of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. I study a lot of those people. Branson—he's very different. Branson's a very different leader than both Bezos, and Bezos is very different than Musk.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:41:38) Elon's more on the servant leader. He can probably be a bit more dogmatic about his point of view, but he is there talking about magnets and electromagnets as he is talking to Sheryl Ellis about the next big factory for Tesla. So he's—Bezos is very similar. I think he has a famous memo about no meeting can be more than a pizza box long. Something to that effect. So I think you'll see the same traits of servant leadership or strategic leadership, and I think you have to have both. I actually also have strategic leadership, but which muscle do you flex more and which do you feel more comfortable is something that we all have to think about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) Yeah. And I tend to lean towards servant leader because I tend to lean towards—you know, my background, software engineering, hands on. And so I lean towards that. I will get in there and do hands-on stuff when we're building a prototype. And when you've got a good idea and they're gonna take it to production, we need the real engineers to get in. Then we'll get the right team in place. But that's how I've started. I've built and sold three softwares, and every one of them, I started with just me coding the most basic version of it, getting to the point where I didn't know how to do stuff, bringing on one person who knew how to do the one thing I couldn't do, and then giving more responsibility to them and scaling it up and building the teams out.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:42:58) Yeah. Yeah. Because you can get—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:00) A sales contract with just a prototype. There's a lot you can do to kind of sell the vision, and then, yeah, as long as you know how to execute on it, nothing like it.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:43:11) Yeah. If the problem—I found out early in business, if the problem is big enough, people will pay you for it before it exists because they need the solution. So they're either gonna have to build it themselves or go find someone to pay them to build it. So if you're already trying to do it, they're like, "Yeah, let's just empower this person."

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) Yeah. I mean, all my Salesforce experience, I'll say this. I have the paradigm: things go from projects to programs to more projects to more programs. That's one path. And then the other path is you go from projects to patterns to products. And which way you take decides where in your career you go. So I actually am more of the projects, patterns, products person, which is why my journey led to S-Docs because I wanted to be a product person. If you can see the patterns and start to build products around it—and products that people wanna buy from you—and you do that a few more times, you build that product.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:44:15) Yeah. It's a better way to get to revenue, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:18) Exactly. And you can speak out a conviction for the problems that you're trying to solve.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:44:22) That is true. Is there a cupcake mold analogy in here somewhere? I read that in the research.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) So I think the product patterns to products is the mold, right? So if you're a baker, you can keep baking cupcakes from scratch and delivering it to your customers. But the more enterprising business would be to build cupcake molds and then creating businesses that can take your cupcake molds and build their own cupcakes that they can be more successful. So you kind of become the plumbing for a whole set of bakeries. So that's—not the best analogy that I can use is, do you wanna be the person that makes the mold or the different types of mold for cakes and cupcakes, or do you wanna be the person that makes the cupcakes? Because I'm the infrastructure play.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:45:09) Yeah. Yeah. That's my favorite business, by the way, infrastructure businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:12) If you're a product person, you're gonna be thinking about molds. If you're a projects and program person, you're gonna be thinking about cupcakes.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:45:22) Yeah. I'm a mold person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:24) Me too.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:45:27) So as we start to wrap up, I like to always ask people the best piece of leadership advice, and I'm gonna give you some constraints here. You're an engineer. Someone shared this with you. You put it into place, and when you put it into action, it was so useful that you've kept it for many years. What leadership advice was that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:46) So, I think it's about bringing bad news early. Had a situation where a senior leader—I was shy of bringing bad news to them because I felt like it would be reflecting badly on my job, that I didn't do my job. And she sat down and said, "Glad you brought this to me, but I want to let you know bad news early on is most welcome. Because then I can give you the shield as well as I can give you all the additional resources." So a lot of people fear that escalation late in the game is good. I almost consider bring bad news sooner because we can pivot. Especially as leaders, we can pivot faster because we probably have decisions and resources at our disposal that you otherwise probably are not privy to. That I think is the advice that I take to heart every day with my teams is tell me if something's going wrong sooner than later.

(Anand Narasimhan at 00:46:53) I love it. 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.