(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and I'm talking to you out of our Boston area studio, and we have been doing a CXO leadership series, talking with leaders across the IT industry about how they're managing during this global pandemic. I'm really happy to welcome back to the program, he's a Cube alumni. He was a Racker, and he is now with Stacker. We'll get into the company in a bit, but Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflows, thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me again Stu. Really a pleasure, and always a fan of the Cube, so great to be here. >> Alright, and we note that you sporting the quarantine, you know beard, you know, grown since the last time we had you on the program. Prasthanth, you were named CEO of Stack Overflow at the end of 2019. Obviously, certain plans that you have you're a Harvard Business School alum, you've worked in, you know, the enterprise and cloud communities for a while. Take us back to, you know, what your team has been doing, really to react and lead in this global pandemic. >> Ya, no happy to, Stu, and obviously this is a very, you know, trying time for, you know, just the world in general right. So, companies small and large are having to kind of grapple with the reality, but I would say in general, I started October 1st, 2019 at, you know, at this amazing company, and it's just, been a real joy to see us really adapt very quickly based on just you know, just kind of challenging environment that we're in, and primarily if you think about Stack Overflow, you know, we were blessed that our, you know, our company has an ethos, an ethos perspective. We've been you know, highly remote in nature for years, for over a decade so you know, 80% of our team, product engineering team has been remote. 60% of our marketing team was remote, and then 40% of our company was remote all around the world. So, moving from that 40% to 100%, which we did very proactively in March, early March of 2020, has been a huge boon for our company in just our Stackers as you pointed out, they've just been very, I would say grateful that we've done that very, very quickly. Secondly, I would say the just the notion of, you know, being able to think about our business, and you know, our community, and how do we help each other. We've done a lot, you know, we meet with you know, we come together as a team, you know, three times a week, and we've already had sort of this Covid stand up as a leadership team, as a newly formed leadership team mind you, which I've just helped form over the past six months, and we've all really gone, you know, really to the extremes to make sure that our Stackers are their health and safety are taken care of. How do we serve our community in this environment? How do we make sure our customers are being, you know, really are getting the maximum value of our products, which are all focused on collaboration, so very relevant in this remote world. So, it's really been, I would say, all around, people have really rallied we had sort of a, I would say, somewhat of an advantage just having you know, adopting remote work at this point. >> But Prasthanth, maybe it makes sense if actually step back for a second. I'm sure most people are familiar with Stack Overflow, but give us, the kind of, the high level view of, you know, what the company is, and what drew you into the leadership role there. >> Yeah, no absolutely. You know I think Stack Overflow extremely well known obviously, with every developer and technologist in the world. So, in a nutshell, you know, we are the world's most trusted and largest community for developers and technologists. We have something like 120 million unique visitors that come to our websites every month, and talking 180,000 sign ups on a monthly basis. So, just say we do say a dramatic amount of impact to help ultimately, these folks solve their most complex problems on a variety of topics, whether that is cloud related topics, security related topics, full stack engineering related topics like Python or Rust, or you name it. All those, you know, those areas are covered in very much and very a lot of detail for our community we effectively share. Solutions to common questions, and code, and really be able to accelerate the development of software around the world. So, ultimately, it comes down to our mission, which our mission what we like to say is we help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists, and so, that's our company in a nutshell. On top of that, ecosystem of communities that we've built. We have a great set of products, SaaS products that we've also built to help with real time collaboration within companies in a very, very similar format to our public community format. So, that's been very compelling. So, the two reasons why I joined the company beyond obviously the mission, number 1 is just the global impact, you know, there are only a few companies that have the level of impact that this company has around the world and helping everybody sort of accelerate their software development. Whatever apps you're building, and obviously we know, that we're sort of in this beautiful, Goldilocks zone of digital transformation, where everything is accelerating, even given the current environment. That's the first reason, just given the vast reach of this company, and then secondly, you know, is the fact that we are really trying to transform the company and accelerate the transformation into a SaaS company. So, our Stack Overflow for teams product, which is again the knowledge sharing SaaS squad that we have internally, is really a phenomenal way to share evergreen knowledge, and non-ephemeral type information within companies so that your most important questions are answered. They're answered once, and your not, you know, constantly having to, you know, tap people on the shoulder to answer a common question. So, those are the two primary reasons. One is the impact to the community, and secondly acceleration of our SaaS business. >> Excellent, Prasthanth. So wonder if you could help us drill in, and understand the business little bit. There's private repository, there's teams there. You know, it's interesting, if you look on the outside you say wait, is this kind of like a Reddit? Or when I hear you describe it, sure reminds me a little bit of say GitHub, who obviously got taken off the table for a rather large number so, I'll let you bring us inside a little bit of you know, how does the company you know, make money, and what are the plans that both, you know, support, you know, those broad communities and diverse things, but also, you know built that business. >> Ya, no absolutely, you know I think for us you know, we really believe it's a common, our mission statement like I mentioned is really our core driver for us, and so the ecosystem of communities that we've built for developers, as well as technologists, again just a very, very vast number, and we create developers right, on a daily basis through our community. So, it's very powerful in that people are learning about new technologies, or frameworks, or you know, cloud technologies through our websites, and so they are you know, that's a bit of a huge accelerant to this creation of jobs, and you know, people's capabilities. On the foundation of that, which is obviously, you know, accessible to everybody, and you know, it's free in fact, we had this ecosystem of products, and the first one in the primary Saas product is Stack Overflow for teams, which is this knowledge sharing and collaboration product that allows companies within, or teams within companies to use the same format that they absolutely love in the public community that they use to, you know, learn up on those subjects that I mentioned, but now share internal priority information to accelerate their development internally. To breakdown walls between teams, like product, and engineering, and developers, and operations, and also go to market teams, like product marketing teams, and sales teams, and so we have you know, a tremendous number of enterprises that have joined our program, over the past several quarters including Microsoft, who is a very happy customer that uses, you know, they have something like 70,000 developers and technologists, and go to market folks within Microsoft that are using our product platform to breakdown walls, and to be able to move very quickly with launching their products, and staying collaborative internally. In addition to that, we have what we call our Reach and Relevance business which is all around helping, just based on the fact that we have such massive reach in 120 million people from around the world showing up on our websites. Being able to help companies you know, showcase their capabilities and products in our platform, and also engage with the community, and for obviously the community to then learn about many of the latest and greatest of what's being launched by these phenomenal companies that are innovating very rapidly. >> Ya, so Prasthanth, we started off the conversation, you talked a little bit about the impact of the global pandemic. I'm curious, are you seeing any, you know, changes in trends? Are there new things that are trending on your site? Are there things that are either on the website, or they're coming to your team to learn more about? >> Ya, no definitely I think there are two places that I can point to. One would be on the community side we've definitely seen a spike in traffic in places like our meta-academia website, you know, as an example. Online learning became a huge topic of interest when people went remote, and obviously, you have families around the world that are trying to figure out not only how to school their kids but we have teachers all around in schools trying to figure out what are the best set of resources. So, we have, you know, all sorts of, like I said, about 40 million questions and answers across all sorts of topics, including you know, next generation E-learning sort of capabilities in our communities, and so, we've seen a spike in traffic in places like that. We've seen a spike in our medical communities, and our biology communities obviously, because of you know, people's curiosity, and these are, you know fairly advanced, you know academics, and people who are in the scientific community that spend a lot of time thinking about, you know the what's really behind Covid-19. What are the details of, you know, if you think about all sorts of topics around genetics, and obviously, the pharmaceutical implications so, we've seen a tremendous uptake in those sites, and in addition of course, overall to our overall websites, because people are spending time, you know, just at home. In addition, we've seen a very material uptake in our Stack Overflow for teams product where we know we just closed, you know our company's like largest deal in our company's history this past week for about 30,000 seats, you know, at a very large financial services institution, a global services financial institution. There's more and more companies that are thinking about business continuity. They're thinking about how do they stay, how do they collaborate across their distributed teams, their remote teams, and we have, obviously a very significant solution in that space. >> Excellent, well congratulations on that deal. It brings up, I guess, what are some of the key KPI's that you're tracking for to really assure the growth and the health of your business. >> Ya, I think both in terms of, you know , if you think about two sides of the coin right. From the community standpoint, obviously we care about our active users, and our engaged users, and the number of sign-ups, and on that front, that first part of that, you know, we've seen just a dramatic increase, you know, in all those stats, including, you know this year, just as a result of Covid, on average last year, in 2019, you know, the number of sign-ups per month was something like, 150,000 sign-ups per month, unique sign ups from around the world. People signing up for Stack Overflow accounts. This year, on average, it's gone up, and March was our highest sign-up month ever with 180,000 sign-ups for the month. So, we're seeing so that's important. In addition to sign-ups of course, when they come on to our websites we want them to get the answers to their most pressing questions, to be able to engage them with content that is useful to them. So, engagement, you know in terms of monthly engaged users very important, monthly active users is very important for us, and obviously our sign-up numbers. So, those are kind of the community oriented stats that we'd, and KPI's that we'd really track, and those look, you know look very promising, and then, finally on the business side, which is the other side of the coin, in our teams business primarily, and our Reach and Relevance business. Our teams business is all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that we have that they've signed up for right. So, are they using the various features? We've integrated that teams product with all the other popular tools that people use for things like real time collaborations. We integrate with Slack. We integrate with Microsoft Teams. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated even with Enterprise, because really the idea is to be a part of that developer and technologist workflow so, folks can really look to Stackflow for Teams as the place where they get common answers, get great answers to their common questions that are constantly being asked within companies, but it's not very effective to ask the same questions again and again. So, the idea is to integrate with these tools to make sure that you are able to have an evergreen place where you can keep that knowledge. So, that's, you know we track usage of those integrations. We talk about how many of those questions and answers are being, you know, being exchanged within companies, and how much ultimately the outcome of saving time and money for our clients so that they are being very effective in their product development cycles, and people are not being tapped on the shoulder for every single item that might comes across for an individual company. So, that's really, there's an economic study that we performed with Forrester that captures a lot of this. So that's, you know, that's and then region relevance is all around engagement on our websites. Some people already looking and seeing, finding value in the content that our companies are posting, and force companies to be effectively translating their knowledge to the audience. >> Awesome. Well, Prasthanth congratulations on the progress, and definitely look forward to cracking the how the Stack Overflow Team is doing going forward. >> Thanks so much Stu, really appreciate the chat, and great to see you again as usual. >> Alright, make sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)