(upbeat music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's The Cube! Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGED 2018, their second now annual event, our first one here. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and Jeff and I are pleased to be joined right off the keynote stage, the SVP product Gene Farrell. Gene, welcome to the Cube! >> Well, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here today. >> So, packed house, this event has doubled in size from your first one last year. It's about a couple thousand people here representing 1100 companies from 20 countries and you had a really cool interactive keynote this morning where you clearly showed very, I thought, organically how much Smartsheet is collaborating with your customers to drive the innovation of Smartsheet technology. Tell us a little about some of those enhancements and how you got the crowd to burst into applause at least three times. >> Well, I, thank you, I would tell you that Smartsheet, our whole product development process is driven by the customer. 95% of what we decided to build in our roadmap is grounded in customer feedback. And so, for us anytime we can engage with customers to learn not just what do they want, but what is the problem they're trying to solve. And that's really the art of great product management is going beyond just the suggestion to how are you going to use it? How does this help your business? Because, many times there's a better way to do it than what they come up with. And so, for us, coming to this ENGAGE conference, I think we announced over 20 new capabilities that are going to be available either now or in the next couple of months. And it was really easy to know we were going to get that applause because they pretty much told us what to build. So, we looked really smart but it's actually we're just listening. And so today we launched a number of great things like multi sign to, new automations, multi-step workflow, bunch of new connectors, a really cool dashboard widget for all sorts of web content. And we just can't wait to see how customers use it. >> It's pretty interesting when you're up there because we see this at a lot of little shows, when they're just getting started and, I'll still call you guys one of the little shows, where kind of the intimacy is so much tighter and really the knowledge sharing is very, very different than when you go to a big giant show that's got tens and tens of thousands of people. And you can feel that it was palatable, I thought that was pretty brave of Mark to walk out into the crowd and stick a microphone in somebody's face, the guy responded and he had an answer to the question of the way Smartsheet has helped him and I think he had two other people. But, what's really critical, we talked about automation a lot and processes a lot but it's the scale of the simple that becomes a big challenge and that's something that squarely right in your guys' roadmap. >> Well, it's definitely what we focus on and one of the things we have as a value as a company is being authentic. And for us, regardless of however big we get we know it's important to show up and be, you know, the best of who we are and engage with our customers in a real and authentic way and so, I think that really helps us have that connection and I hope when we're a billion dollar plus revenue company that we have that same feeling. And this conference hopefully will grow to tens of thousands but I think staying grounded in customers is just critically important. And I think how we differ from maybe some other folks in the technology space is we really focus on that every day user. How do we provide practical innovation that has the power they need without all the complexity that turns them off or scares them? And that's not, it's something that nobody else really focuses on and you hear a lot from technical companies about their powerful new innovation and these great breakthrough ideas but too many times it's engineers building for technically minded folks. And we've just chosen to go after a different group. >> I'm just curious how the people usually come into Smartsheet because, you know, the workflow space and, you know, there's just so many things out there that are all about the new way to work and you know, competing for my screen that I'm working on the majority of the time. So, I'm just curious where do people find you? How do they usually enter? 'Cause you got a pretty broad suite of applications and you integrate with a lot of different desktop tools so what's kind of that process do you see? >> I would say it's probably two primary ways. First is, we still have over a 100 thousand people every month that show up at our door and sign up for a free trial. Because they're looking for a better solution. They've been living hand to mouth with email and spreadsheets and they're just kind of overwhelmed by the velocity of work that's happening, the pace of change, and the old way isn't working for them anymore. And so, a big part of how people find Smartsheet is just they go out on the internet and say I'm looking for a better way to be more effective or I'm looking for a new way to manage a workflow or a project. The other way, and about 40% of our new customers that sign up for licenses come through our collaboration model. And it's actually kind of unique for us at Smartsheet. When you buy a Smartsheet license you are entitled to share your work with an unlimited number of collaborators both inside and outside your company. And those collaborators can view the work but also participate in the process. They can update sheets, they can provide input to the flow, and they actually get to engage and be part of that. And what we find is when people see the power of how other people manage and they participate they realize, hey, I want to use this for some of my work. >> So, it's not read-only? They can actually engage in my project that I've invited them to participate in? >> Absolutely, and the great they for you as the license owner is you never have to worry, hey, I want to share this with Sue. Does she have a license? Or do I have to go let her know ahead of time? You can share freely and not worry about people being able to participate. >> Well you have a big pipeline 'cause I was reading over the weekend that there's about 650,000 active individual users but about 3 million collaborators. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Is that a differentiator for Smartsheet in terms of enabling that waterfall of demand generation? >> Well, we certainly think it's unique, right? There's lots of folks that kind of go down the free tier path. Where they say I'm going to give you all the capabilities in a free tier but I'm going to try and ratchet it down so you run into these pay walls at every turn where you then have to kind of license the organization wall to wall. And we just feel that doesn't really work for us. For us, we think it's important that anybody that's creating value in Smartsheet should have to pay for the value that they're using it to go create things with. But, the people that they enroll in that process, until they actually are creating their own stuff they should be able to participate for free. We think it really fits nicely with how modern work is evolving with a lot of teams and frankly a lot of teams across organizations. So, interesting fact is almost 40% of sharing in Smartsheet is with people that are outside of the company sharing. So, if you're sharing with all those folks in different companies and working across different organizations, trying to figure out who has what licenses and how to do things is just going to be a nightmare. So we want to make that just completely frictionless. >> So one of the things that is interesting about Smartsheet is that this is designed for the business user. You know, whether you're in sales, IT, finance, engineering, lot of different use cases you talked about kind of the breadth earlier, Jeff. Walk me through, if I'm at a large enterprise organization and I need to launch an omnichannel marketing campaign, but I use email, I use Slack, we got SalesForce, CRM. Maybe some of my, maybe I'm going to be collaborating with a different function that's using a competitive solution. How do you help me, I need to mange this campaign and I need to launch and I need to measure it. How do you help me connect my Slack, my teammates that aren't using it, that are on email. You're smiling big, walk us through that, what does that integration look like? >> Well, I think the first thing to remember is we really focus on the 60% of work that's unstructured and dynamic. So, this is the work that's constantly changing, and many times left to the business user to figure out how to get things done. And we recognize that in managing that unstructured work there are kind of different tools for different parts of the job, right? Just like if you go to any good mechanic's toolbox he's got more than just a hammer in there. And so for the business user they need messaging tools, like Slack or email to communicate. They create new content with document tools, whether it's G-Suite or O365. When they bridge the old world to the new world in the cloud they need file, sync, and share. People still have files, ironically, that sit on desktops and so they need to able to manage those in the cloud. None of those solutions is going to go away. You still need those for different things. Where we play is really helping people manage the what, when, and by whom. How do you actually execute the work? And today there's not a great platform to do that outside of Smartsheet. And so what we try do then is work seamlessly with all the tools that they're using today. So, to answer your question. If you're a Slack user, to get started with integrating Slack with Smartsheet it's as simple as from Slack, turning on the Smartsheet bot. That Smartsheet bot that enables you to receive signal directly from Smartsheet into Slack on update requests, notifications, approval requests that you can then action without ever leaving Slack. You can actually approve an invoice, you can update a Smartsheet directly from that Slack channel. It's the same type of integrations with file, sync, and share where you can attach documents from a Dropbox, or a Onedrive or a Box directly to a row or a sheet. And have a connection to the other work. >> So you're not driving the user back to do everything through the Smartsheet app, I can share things through Slack but I can also be right in Slack having a conversation with a teammate, >> Absolutely. >> And share everything through that directly. >> Absolutely. In fact, our integrations with our messaging platform, which is a core part of our strategy to kind of support how people work today in these modern platforms, really involves two types of integration. There's a channel integration. So, let's so you have a group of folks that are collaborating on some work, you've got a common sheet that you're using to actually manage the details of how you're going to get stuff done and then you have a Slack channel set up for them to engage, communicate, make decisions, collaborate. You can actually send signal directly from that sheet into the channel where everybody sees it in real time. >> What about mobile? >> Totally, works on mobile and on desktop. And then we actually have the bot, intelligent bot based integrations that are more personal. So, that's really your signal and the actions that you need to take. So, we're trying to really cover all bases and how teams want to engage with messaging. >> Just curious, as you've been rolling this out for a couple years, some of the crazier applications that you had no idea that people would use. This application for this type of use case, you can share us a funny, some great stories. >> There's certainly a broad array of use cases and there's a lot of times when you'll hear about a story and then you're like, well, yeah, I guess Smartsheet would be pretty good for that one. But, I would tell you, the ones that to me I get most excited about are the situations where the customer needs to do something really quickly because they're reacting to a signal or something that's happening in the market. And, so, one of the ones that I thought was really cool was actually last year's hurricanes, with Harvey and Irma. One of our large customers, Starbucks, actually used Smartsheet as a tool to connect with their teams and then manage the recovery. And, what they realized going in was they're team members are going to be on the ground in these areas that have been devastated by the hurricane. And they're not going to have internet connectivity, they're probably not going to have power, they got to reach them through mobile. And so they set up a really simple process where every morning they pushed a mobile form in Smartsheet to all of their crew members in those markets. And, the first thing they asked them was, are you okay, do you need help. And then once they knew that they were alright they then said, hey, are you available to work? Your store's going to be re-opening we want to know if you can work? And then with the managers they would poll on what's the state of the physical location and can we actually get open and start serving this community that's been devastated by this disaster? They literally came up with that idea and deployed in a couple of days. And they were getting, if you talk to their CEO, he would tell that he was getting reports every day on the status of who was available and how things were coming together. And then, the funny part of that is, they actually then were able to use that same Smartsheet mobile app to capture all the damage in store and my understanding was it was the first time they were actually able to get full recovery on insurance claims after an event like that. >> Oh, wow, alright. >> That's not really funny but a I really love that. >> Very impactful. >> But it's super important. But so we'll lighten it up a little bit before we let you go. In a prior life, your worked at Coca-Cola. >> I did. >> And you worked on the Freestyle. And for those who aren't familiar, Freestyle is the really cool vending machine when you go to McDonald's or Wendy's or whatever with all the push buttons. And what I find so interesting about Freestyle, it comes up at all the tech conferences. It was really a digital transformation of brown sugar water >> Absolutely. >> Into a phenomenal data stream that provided all types of transformational stories. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that story and add a little color 'cause I think it's just a fantastic example of digital transformation of something that probably most people didn't think was possible. >> Sure, oh no, I'd be happy to. It's one of my favorite stories to tell, actually. It was an amazing six year run for me and really what got me into wanting to be in product. I had spent the first half of my career at Coke really in Sales, Marketing and General Management. And, the Freestyle opportunity really came up because our engineering team at Coke had come up with an idea that was really designed to save money on the supply chain. They thought, let's take the water out of all these, the syrup that we ship all over the country and we can make a lot lighter and we'll save all this money. >> All kinds of benefits from not drying the water out. >> And our leadership looked at that and said, hey, we think there might be something more here. And so, the President of the Food Service division at the time invited me to come back to Atlanta and he showed me this prototype and he said, we're not really sure what this is going to be but we want to put a business leader on this to see if there's something here. He said, it can be three months or three years, you never know. So I uprooted my family from Seattle, moved back to Atlanta kind of a little bit on a whim. Like, we could've been over. And the funny thing is he said, there's lots of jobs in Atlanta. What he didn't say was there's lots of jobs at Coke in Atlanta. So, I'm not sure if he was trying to tell me something. But what was really fun about that was that Coke took a completely different approach. For a 125 year old company, completely different approach to innovation than what they traditionally would've done. Which would've been, hey, let's give it to the innovation group. Let's have senior meetings every three months to decide what to do next. >> Kick out new Coke and that didn't work out very well. >> Yeah, well, kick out new Coke. But what they did was they empowered a small team. I basically ran like a little startup. I reported to a board, I had no line reporting and we kept it totally confidential. We isolated the team away from the rest of the organization and we were allowed to just go run. And my board gave us everything we needed as far as resources and money. And we started with the consumer. And we said, hey, what is it that, if we could transform drinking soda away from home what would that look like? And what we found was people wanted a lot more variety than what they were getting at that time. Used to be six choices, right? Five of them brown, one of them caffeine-free, one of them diet, no caffeine-free diet, I mean it was just like we were missing the boat, right? If you went to a 7-11 there's 3,000 choices. You go to McDonald's, six. And so they wanted a lot more choice and they wanted to be able to pour the drink themselves. And so we thought that was a really powerful insight. What was interesting about that is they didn't trust the kid behind the counter to get it right. Which, I think is kind of ironic but at the end of the day, we invented the technology around this idea of providing almost unlimited choice and really rolling the consumer in the process of creation and it was amazing. When we delivered that to our end users we saw 50% increases in volume, remember this is a brand that's growing 2%, 3%. >> Super mature market. >> Yeah, super mature market, complete game changer. And it really unleashed this sense of creativity with consumers around what's possible, right, on the drink side. Now, on the business side, what was transformative for the company was that this was a completely wired experience. And it had had to be, frankly, to pull off delivering a 125 different choices in a restaurant. You got to arm that customer with lots of information about what do they need, how to configure, how to service. And so those machines were all connected. And they provided tons of great data on what consumption was happening inside the restaurant. But, also air logs on the equipment, how everything was performing and so it really led to a completely rethinking. How do you actually manage a network of connected devices? And it was kind of funny because we were really kind of pre-cloud. >> Pre-cloud, pre IoT. >> When we first started we had the machines called home every night using a wireless modem. We actually started, we did a contract with a IT service provider to provide servers to actually house the data. And we did this contract, oh these will hold you for three years. Within a month we were running out of server capacity because all of the data we were getting. And so it was really, it was super, super fun and we iterated that I spent six years on that and really it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. >> Probably one of the most relatable digital transformation stories and you guys are also doing that at Smartsheet. Gene, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by the Cube and one of the things I like that you said in the beginning, and we'll leave it with this, is that Smartsheet is authentic. I think authenticity is contagious. So, thank you for your time. >> Well, thanks for having me, it's a pleasure. >> Thanks. >> And for Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff, and I'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)