Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are in the 2018 timeframe now?

Swapnil Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next few strategic moves that got you further?

Swapnil Jain: 2019 was a big product year. We had a product that we were shipping every day, but we didn’t know if this was strategic or not. The big strategic decision in 2019 was getting a strong VP of Product. If I look back, that is something I should have done sooner. I acted as a product leader, but I was not good.

We got a VP of Product in 2019 who was phenomenal. That was when we started giving shape to our product. The second was, we started thinking about direct go-to-market. We started hiring more account executives to come in and do their own prospecting and start selling. That was the big change in 2019. Our Series A happened in 2019. That also fueled our growth.

Sramana Mitra: How about 2020?

Swapnil Jain: Everyone knows what happened in 2020. We started Q1 pretty strong. January and February were big months for us. Then I vividly remember this. We were opening an office in San Francisco. This was my last trip before COVID. I went to the office at 7PM because we were opening next week. I met the team.

The next week, COVID hit. The week after that, lockdown. We didn’t know what to do. The interesting thing about COVID was that it was not just a macroeconomic phenomena; it was also a people phenomena. You had to figure out your people strategy. It was tough. A lot of new structures were put in place for us to work and figure out our rhythm.

The second was more on how contact centers are going to behave now. Will they still buy? Fortunately, 2020 was a good year for us. We didn’t see that much slowdown. We continued to grow. We got good deals. That was a good year I would say. We doubled in revenue actually. We raised our Series C in the middle of the year.

Sramana Mitra: A lot of enterprise software companies found 2020 sales cycle very interesting. People were buying with just Zoom calls.

Swapnil Jain: It took away a lot of the process. We realized that they were fine. They were absolutely fine doing these deals over the phone or Zoom. We didn’t have any problems going into that. The biggest problem is getting used to working from home and finding the right rhythm.

Sramana Mitra: Your operation is a US and India operation right?

Swapnil Jain: Yes, we are about 250 people. We have 150 in India. All are in engineering and machine learning. All of our go-to-market is in the US – sales, marketing, customer success. We have a lot of leadership in the Bay Area.

Sramana Mitra: Everything went to work from home in 2020?

Swapnil Jain: Yes. We grew double. How do we onboard these people? How do be build connections?

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2021?

Swapnil Jain: We did almost 2.5x. We had just raised Series B. Customers were starting to get used to buying remotely, so that was great. We hired a lot that year. The big change that year was the leadership build out. I started thinking about getting the C-suite. I hired the next leadership. We got a new customer leader, a new sales leader, a marketing leader. We started to move upmarket as well. We were seeing larger deals. We also started seeing more of that happen.

Sramana Mitra: By 2021, you have a lot of deals. What do you know about the key use cases that are getting you into these deals?

Swapnil Jain: What we learned is that a lot of contact centers that were scaling would need better technology to scale. I can’t keep adding more people all the time. I need better tools to monitor my team, to coach my team, and manage my team. Attrition is 40% at least. It’s a crazy industry. The other thing that happened is COVID.

When people moved remote, they became more comfortable with cloud solutions than on-premise solutions. You can’t deploy on-premise solutions when you’re remote. Then they became more comfortable with cloud. That was a big change. When 2021 ended, people are very clear that contact centers that are scaling need technology. They need AI. They want to be more efficient.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain
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