EP 126: Eran Zinman (Co-Founder, monday.com) on The Efficiency Hacks That Drove monday.com to $14B

Eran Zinman entered a crowded category, out-executed everyone, and scaled monday.com into a $14B public company. In my latest conversation with him, he details their unique metric tracking system (dubbed Big Brain) that allows them to do the same amount of work with ½ the people, along with their relentless focus on cash over other metrics, and the little tactics that brought significant ROI (like sending everyone—including investors—a daily SMS with yesterday’s metrics). (00:00) Introduction to the Logan Bartlett Show (01:12) The Philosophy Behind Monday.com (01:29) Building a Flexible Platform (04:12) Competing in a Crowded Market (06:21) The Evolution of Monday.com (13:43) The Importance of Cash Efficiency (14:22) Big Brain: The In-House Analytics Platform (23:54) Performance Marketing Strategies (29:47) AI Integration and Future Prospects (38:51) Founder Mode and Company Philosophy (40:53) Learning from Mistakes and Adapting (43:04) Customer Success and Service Philosophy (46:53) Building a Strong Company Culture (51:10) Interviewing and Hiring Best Practices (54:49) Going Public and Investor Relations (01:03:38) Co-CEO Model and Partnership (01:08:34) Future Vision for Monday.com (01:11:07) Embracing Failure and Continuous Improvement Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with co-founder and co-CEO of Monday.com, Aron Zinman. Aron has built Monday into a business worth over $14 billion. Aron and I talk about a number of different things, including the operating discipline and focus that has allowed Monday to blow past a number of their initial competitors, as well as his use on how AI is going to change the potential for businesses like his, some of the implications that exist for things like pricing, as well as the culture that Monday.com has been able to build. Really fun conversation with someone that I have long admired and been curious about

• 0:49Logan Bartlett?

  how they've been able to execute in a otherwise very competitive market, as well as they have thus far. You'll hear that discussion with Aron here now.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Aron, thanks for doing this.

• 0:59Logan Bartlett?

  Great to have you on.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:03Logan Bartlett?

  So maybe first, for people that don't know, how do you describe what Monday.com is?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. One word is work platform, but I'm going to need probably more than one word to describe exactly what it is.

• 1:15Logan Bartlett?

  That's good. Yeah, we have a lot of time here, so feel free to filibuster or talk as long as you want.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Great. So basically, Monday is a platform where one of the main principles that we had from day one is to make it 100% flexible, which is very different from, I would say, traditional software. We give people the freedom to shape how to use the software to fit their specific needs. This has been a core principle for us from day one. Essentially, you know, every business is different. Every business operates in a different industry, and it just seems all right to build one solution that will be rigid for everybody, that's going to force them to use our software in a very specific way. So from day one, we operate on this principle that we're going to give the superpower to

• 2:04Speaker 01

  our users to shape the software to their needs. And they basically do whatever makes sense to them for their own business. I know it sounds a little bit high level, but you know,

• 2:14Logan Bartlett?

  No, we can dive into the specifics of all of that. One of the things that I heard you say that I thought was interesting is that you're not a big believer in ideas, but instead you fell in love with this this problem. And that was how you how you oriented the business. Can you can you describe what this problem is that that you know, you you started pursuing for Monday?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think as a founder, often people's intuition is let's find a problem that nobody tackled before, or let's think about, you know, a brilliant idea that nobody thought about before. And I have this passion for, let's think about an industry that's actually fully packed with other players. It shows that, you know, there's a lot of demand from customers. And I try to think how we can disrupt it and build something better for those people. If you think about it, you know, our initial product was mostly focused on work management and project management. That's probably one of the most packed categories out there. And then afterwards, we went for CRM, service, dev, you know, those industries have been existed for years.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  But we just came with a different approach. We wanted to build something, as I said, that gives a lot of freedom to our users and just give them something that didn't have before as a tool. I think that a lot of work management software, for example, or project management software, they come with this concept of we found the best way to manage, or we found the perfect structure for people to lay out information. And I don't think a perfect structure exists. I think that's the wrong way to think about things. I think we need to give them the best tools and the best building blocks to help them solve their own problems.

• 4:02Logan Bartlett?

  I want to get into the operating side of things, but maybe from a philosophical product architecture standpoint, this, as you mentioned, it's a, at least the original category you went after is certainly a crowded one. And some of the names that I think were ahead of you in terms of scale and at least media valuation as well, companies like Asana and Smartsheet and Airtable perhaps as well, were all buzzy at different points in time. From a product and insight standpoint, was it, was it this flexibility that you think allowed you to be more, better received by the market? I mean, I think you've surpassed all those businesses

• 4:45Logan Bartlett?

  from a valuation standpoint. And I realize you operated very well, but was the, was the insight, this, this flexible architecture that sort of allowed for modularity that maybe those other systems were a little too opinionated to do?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't think it's a product. I think it's just a totally different business direction and we built a different kind of business. When we went public initially about three and a half years ago, investors compared us to the companies you mentioned, you know, they have Asana through the world, the Smartsheets, private players. And that shifted over time because, you know, investors, the market and customers realized that what they buy is something much wider than that. It's the Monday platform. And work management and project management was one use case that we've built on top of that platform. But for example, you know, now we

• 5:36Speaker 01

  have Monday CRM and Monday Dev. No player in each one of those categories competes in the other categories. So you will find a CRM player competes in the work management and vice versa. So what we built is very unique. We just built a different kind of business that initially can be compared to Asana or Smartsheet, but over time, the course that we took and the path that we took is very different compared to those companies. And definitely the flexibility allowed that, but also create a huge product differentiation compared to the other players.

• 6:09Logan Bartlett?

  I guess I want to go down this rabbit hole a little bit. So, so from the, from the start, did you think? That you would have this underlying platform and build applications on top of it? Or was that something that you realized along the way that this was possible?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Well, I would like to say yes, but that's not the truth. So when we started, we had one concept in mind is that we want to build a platform that's 100% flexible. Both my partner Roy and myself were developers. So we hold always had in mind this concept of we have this superpower where we can write code. Now with AI, it's not such a superpower anymore, but we have this ability to customize our own software, let's say, and we wanted to give it to other people. And nobody knew what low code, no code meant at the time. Nobody knew what, you know, platforms were at the time, but we just had this crazy concept that we stuck with throughout the way.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And along the way, we found that because of that belief and that concept that we kind of stuck with, it just led us through this path. Because when we launched our first version of the product, we thought initially it's going to be mostly startup, tech companies using us, you know, traditional industries. I had no idea that, you know, today 70% of our customers is going to be non tech companies. I had no idea that we're going to have customers from, you know, hotels management all the way to retail to other verticals that have no idea how to operate in, but they use the money abilities to build their own software. So I couldn't predict the path that we went through and definitely not building like

• 7:51Speaker 01

  a full fledged CRM or dev or service. That actually came from our users doing it themselves on the platform. So we were very open throughout the way and trying to change what can be achieved with the platform. But the core principles of that, you know, flexibility that I've mentioned, it's been since day one.

• 8:12Logan Bartlett?

  Is there a broad insight there that you would potentially espouse for founders that are listening and thinking about their, their journey and where their product can Make them. It sounds like maybe you were less opinionated about where you were headed and more receptive to being nimble along the way. I realized at one point, like the pulse way back when the former name of Monday.com was centered on like an entirely different application of maybe this, this product that, that versus the one you ultimately found initial success with. And so I guess, is that something that you would recommend for, for founders in general? Or do you think that was unique to your end market?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  No, I think that's something I recommend to other founders as well, because like you said, something that we really believe in is fall in love with the problem and what are you trying to build? And essentially, we, we saw a huge vacuum in the work management space and other markets as well. But we were open to change the products along the way. And I think a lot of founders kind of fall in love with one specific solution. And I, I don't know any successful company, you know, I don't think back in the days, take Microsoft, for example, they would imagine they're going to have gaming consoles or AI or even assets. But this is how you create a huge company. You change and adapt along the way.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I don't think that's a disadvantage. I think a lot of founders feel that if they change course along the way, they somehow failed. And I think the opposite, that just proves that you're resilient and you can operate and you can change. Because the reality changes all the time. The market changes, et cetera.

• 9:56Logan Bartlett?

  In entering a competitive market, in sort of thinking about when there's a bunch of different solutions there, did you have, did you feel like there was a product, this product architecture in, in flexible structure around, you know, pursuit, not necessarily being prescriptive about how the problems are going to be solved? Did you think that was ultimately going to be enough of a differentiator? Or was it just confidence in your ability to operate and execute? Because I want to get into some of the specific things that you did from a tactical level. But you, you guys have almost been a machine in terms of just your, your operating execution and all of that.

• 10:39Logan Bartlett?

  So I'm curious, do you think it was requisite to have the product in sight? Or were you just confident in your ability to out execute people from a marketing standpoint, a customer success standpoint, whatever, whatever incremental thing there was?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I would say both because you could be an execution machine, but if you don't got the right product, you know, nothing can help you. And you might have the most amazing product, but if you fail to execute, eventually the company is going to fail. So definitely, I think you should have both. I would say that having a strong DNA in the company and being open to change makes you much more resilient over time. But definitely having the right product was a huge game changer for us. And again, I think it's not a matter of, you know, yet another feature. I think what I'm trying to emphasize here that I

• 11:33Speaker 01

  really see this as an evolution of SaaS software because, you know, definitely Salesforce was kind of the first pioneer building the, you know, cloud software, SaaS subscription, you know, principal and so on, which created a huge trend of many SaaS software out there. But I feel that with Monday and just other players doing that, we built on the second generation of that, which is to give more power to our users and to allow them to use software the way that suits them. So I don't think it's a matter of, you know, a feature or a nuance in how we built the product, just a completely new way to help people adopt and use products over time.

• 12:13Logan Bartlett?

  So I spent six years at Battery Ventures before joining Redpoint. I've been here now for five years, but I remember you were raising what I think was your Series B. And when you were at Depulse, and I was, I was kind of brought in as an ancillary member of the deal team because I had spent time in broader project management. And there were two things that stood out to me about, about your business that were perhaps counterintuitive at the time or not conventional wisdom that you guys were executing on. And I think has powered you in a meaningful way to where you are today. One was performance marketing and

• 12:53Logan Bartlett?

  big brain. And you guys were unapologetic about this being something that you wanted to pursue. And I think that was

• 13:03Logan Bartlett?

  At least, I don't know, looked down upon a little bit in the venture community. I know that was certainly my sentiment at the time, so I can at least speak for myself. And the other one was was more cash-based burn and thinking about collections and all of that stuff. And so I'd love to talk about those two things maybe separately. On the, for people that don't know, can you explain maybe what Big Brain is? And how you thought about performance marketing in the early days and driving growth for Monday?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Sure. First of all, I think I worry myself with probably one of the worst raisers of venture funds.

• 13:41Logan Bartlett?

  All right, you guys did a good, listen, venture fundraising is a means to an end. And so I think if you build a good enough business, ultimately you get to be pretty good at fundraising because people will find you. So I, I think you did a good enough job to get to where you are today.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think it's right to build a good business to be lousy at raising money than the opposite. So.

• 14:03Logan Bartlett?

  I think that's right. I think that's right. One of those, one of those turns up sustaining itself and one of those ends up, you know, burning, burning up or going bankrupt or whatever.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I'll take it. So, yeah, so, so first of all, we built the platform called Big Brain. Just to explain what it is, it's not a product that we sell. It's a system we built in-house. Actually, it's not very intuitive, but we started, we were like six or seven people total in the company. So like super early days and, you know, our initial intuition, let's use something off the shelves, you know, analytic software off the shelf.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  But I don't know, since day one, we had this huge inspiration that we want to build a big company. And we said that, you know, if we want to be successful, we have to control our own destiny. We have to control information. And we cannot slide blind. We have to know exactly what's going on. I would need to optimize. And build a business that's very efficient because back in the days, unlike, you know. What happened in the later years, we didn't have a lot of resources to raise money from. Our Series A was actually 1.4 million. Well, you could call it like a seed round, but you know, we had to be very efficient in how we spend money. So since day one, we tracked everything, literally everything.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Every campaign clicked, every visit to our website, every banner view, every YouTube ad being watched. And then because we built it on our own platform, we could track a user all the way throughout the signup funnel, conversion to payment eventually, expansion and so on. So you could see like a complete user journey years back with all the data, all the touchpoints, everything that converted that user into a paid account and eventually how they expanded over time. And first of all, having that data, that's kind of the main work we've moved on with the years. And then on top of that, what we built is a very efficient, uh, business marketing engine that can kind of crunch all that data

• 16:17Speaker 01

  and let us know in a very specific way which campaign that we're running is very effective and which one we're losing money on. And also that, going back to your second point, like the question is, what do you optimize for? Like LTV, CAC, you know, NDR, ACV, what do you optimize for? Because you could collect all the data, but then what's, what's the target function? And, and for us, you know, it was always cash. Because, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm the SaaS geek, freak, whatever you want to call it. Like I, I know all the metrics in the in and out, but I don't know, it's because cash was, you know,

• 16:59Speaker 01

  out there in the last six or seven years, but it seems like almost nobody cares about cash. Like everybody talks about, you know, like financial value and financial cost. But nobody talks about what actually goes in, goes out, out of the company bank account. But at the end of the day, you know, I always say to people, I joke that you cannot go to the supermarket and pay with LTV. Like you cannot do that. People need cash in order to operate their business. So we always try to optimize for that, like, how much should we spend? Actually, spend going out. When do we get the cash back? Do people pay us annually or monthly? Do they upgrade and so on?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  And I think that eventually what made Monday a very efficient cash machine over time.

• 17:49Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, I want to unpack both of those a little bit more, but going back to Big Brain and setting up the the culture or the operating discipline to to track everything. I'm curious, at a quite literal level, how did you go about staffing against it and and building the culture so that you could maybe test all these different things and track it? Was Big Brain, was that a dedicated group internally that sat, that didn't have like a singular functional responsibility, but but went across organizations? Or how did you ultimately build that up?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so practically, initially it was Ryan and myself. You know, we're both developers, but then we got out of that group of seven people. We had one dedicated developer for that. You know, percentage was was a lot. Right now, it's a huge team, over a hundred people in the company.

• 18:42Logan Bartlett?

  And how many people do you guys have today?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Twenty four hundred.

• 18:46Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, wow. So it's a it's a big portion of of the business, five percent or whatever.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  But that's that's probably one of the best ROI we ever have we have in the company. The having Big Brain, we probably would have been twice the amount of people we are now just to operate the business without Big Brain. So again, this is an estimation, but you know, throughout the years, we always thought about what are we doing that's manual? What are we doing that doesn't involve deep thinking, but rather like, you know, manual work or just optimizing things that could be being done using a script or an algorithm? And let's put that into Big Brain, because we want people to focus on deep work. We want to focus on. You know, moving the company forward and not operating the company.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  And Big Brain has saved us so much time and money over the years. And I just feel we would have been probably a different company if we hadn't built this tool internally.

• 19:43Logan Bartlett?

  And initially it was focused on performance marketing, but it sounds like it's maybe extended from that. Or do I, do I have that correct?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, initially it was focused on performance marketing. Also, we had all the company metrics on it. So you know, ARR groups and all the breakdowns, all the cohorts and VR. Actually, Big Brain was open and is still today, open for every employee in the company, everyone. You know, whether you're VP or you just joined two days ago, you can see everything. That kind of tied up to our transparency principle that was very deep in our DNA. So we had everybody's eyes on the company metrics. Everybody knew how much cash we're spending, how much cash is in the bank, how much we're collecting. How was the ARR yesterday, last month?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  So everybody still have access to Big Brain. So initially it was focused mostly on performance marketing and just seeing general company, you know, analytics, I would say.

• 20:42Logan Bartlett?

  And the 100 people today, is it mostly engineering? Or does it have a bunch of different functional types of people within the, within Big Brain?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say mostly engineering, data analytics people, but also product people. We care a lot about the user experience in Big Brain because you could build the most amazing tool, but if nobody uses it internally, you know, it doesn't worth the investment. So we care about, a lot about usage, interaction, just make it, you know, super efficient for everybody in the company.

• 21:20Logan Bartlett?

  And I guess the cash point, maybe it sounds obvious, but, or at least it sounds obvious when you say it at a high level. But, but as you drill in at a, at a more fundamental level, there's, there's obviously trade offs in prioritizing cash collections. And so I'm curious how you thought about like, A dollar of ARR that you could get over the course of 12 months, let's say it was paid quarterly or something like that versus, what was the appropriate trade off to get that cash all collected upfront? And like, how did you sort of think about what balance you wanted to optimize for the overall ARR

• 22:06Logan Bartlett?

  versus what you could collect individually from a customer at that point in time?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's the point because I think a lot of people, when they think about, we want to be more aggressive or we just raised another round, we can spend more on acquiring customers. Let's say we got a great LTV of, I don't know, $100,000, but so we could spend more to acquire those customers. But that's not the point because when you recycle cash quickly, you can reinvest that into the business. I always say that our best investor has been our customers because the fact they pay for the tool upfront, the fact we managed to get them on board quickly, allowed us to get the cash back, reinvest that into marketing.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Essentially, let's say out of that 1.4 I mentioned in our seed round, we spent, you know, again, I don't remember the exact number, but about $5 million in performance marketing using that 1.4. So that's being aggressive. That's capturing more larger portion of the market and being very efficient as opposed to, you know, spending that 1 million on getting, you know, great customers with long LTV, then you have to wait out for that LTV to become real cash you can reinvest into the business. So for us, you know, being very efficient and aggressive and grow rapidly was, how can we?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  You know, quickly grab a significant portion of the market to fulfill potential as a company, if it makes sense.

• 23:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. I'm curious, as you mentioned, like plowing more money back into performance marketing, if I remember correctly, or what I had heard from investors way back when, you obviously had to diversify the different channels of acquisition that you went after. And I forget what the first one was that you targeted. Maybe it was Google AdWords or something. What was it, Facebook, maybe? What was the first one?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  It was Facebook, actually.

• 24:07Logan Bartlett?

  How did you, how did you think about like the platform risk? Or going deep into a single channel versus A B testing others from the start and figuring out what other ones could find different efficacy around it? Did you try to be diverse initially? Or did you just go as far as you could in one? And when you started to saturate that, go after others?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  It was more about going deep initially on Facebook ads, but that actually led to a great outcome because I feel that if we were very specific to begin with, we probably wouldn't have realized the potential of what a platform can deliver. Because essentially, you know, everybody is on Facebook or YouTube. Even if you're a high-level executive or a CEO or, you know, a Fortune 500 company executive, you'd probably be on Facebook at some point or YouTube. So you probably, you have access for everybody, tech or non-tech. And just because we did more of a broad messaging, just captured different types of audiences

• 25:13Speaker 01

  and verticals that we couldn't have imagined that have potential to be our customers. And then eventually, when we went on to go another platform, I feel just the inventory that we felt that we could target was much wider than what we initially thought it was.

• 25:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I remember you guys were super successful with different like landing pages and you would have pretty bespoke, at least on Google SEO, when I would type in, I don't know, HR onboarding template or something. You guys always ranked really, really high in terms of like building sort of modular presentations of what the functionality could exist within it. And obviously it was under same underlying primitives or platform within it. But a lot of different modular applications of it that you were then able to sort of tie out to, I assume, Google Ads in that case, or Facebook, or YouTube, or whatever, in terms of personalization.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that eventually the way people, you know, search tools online, they have a very specific intent or a business need thereafter, and they need immediate satisfaction usually.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, I often joke with people that, you know, we build this very modular platform, but nobody goes in Google and search for a selectable platform. Nobody does that. That's, that's what we want to build, but nobody searched that.

• 26:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that, and DC is like that, but customers like problems being solved, right?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, and it makes sense. So we, we always said, we need to serve our customers and drive them towards our grand vision. And not that stores are like, wait for our customers to convert to our vision. We need to be there where they are. So we, you know, what we've done is, like you said, because money can be anything for everyone, we package it for different people needs and get them started. And then eventually they discover what they can actually do with the platform.

• 27:16Logan Bartlett?

  I want to talk about AI more generally in a second, but I guess I'm curious, just as we're on the performance marketing thread. I assume you guys have been experimenting with some of the different types of advertising that you can do in this generative AI world. I'm curious, are there any interesting takeaways or things that have been counterintuitive to you in the early days of playing around with some of this stuff?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  In terms of the actual ad creation or?

• 27:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, all the above. I guess maybe, how do you think about advertising on some of the AI platforms that are coming out? Like, I assume at some, I mean, perplexity said that they're going to start doing advertising, I think, next year. Chat GPT at some point, I assume we'll have some, some advertising stuff around that. So I guess that's an interesting question, but that might be a little more speculative. I'm curious on the more generative side of actually presenting these ads on things like Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, where you can actually create copy or different types of A B tests around things that are generative in some way. I'm curious what you guys have seen in that.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we do use some tools to generate, you know, ads, but I would say it's a significant way for us to generate ads right now. It might change in the future. It still involves some, you know, humans behind the process. But in terms of advertising on AI platforms, definitely open to it. I mean, we're open to any platform, I would say. But, you know, once that's become available, we'll be happy to explore it.

• 28:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it feels like you don't know which side of the coin. It's like the old adage of marketing. I don't know which 50% works and I don't know which side. Like being early to some of those things, I have to assume it either presents a total waste of time and it's not going to be effective, or it's like enormously beneficial and super effective and very underpriced. And it's hard to know which one it's ultimately going to be. So I assume you need, you want to be out in front of some of these things, trying to figure out which bucket it's going to go into.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, eventually it's a free market, so those things even out over time. So we'll try if there's, you know, huge benefit to that. I'm sure other players will notice that.

• 29:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, time, typically, there's usually a couple of quarters or so. You know, people not being totally perfect with it. So on the AI side, I'm curious how you all think of the opportunity as well as things you're thinking about, maybe on the risk side for, for AI as it relates to Monday's business?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh. Well, first of all, I'm I'm super excited for it. Uh. Genuinely excited for it from a personal level, but mostly on the company level. Um. Actually, um, you know, we've been working on a few things within Monday. Um. So just to give you a high level overview, um. So far, the way we kind of see AI incorporating to Monday is in three ways. Um. One, um, we build something that we call AI blocks within the platform. What it does basically is that people build automation at the top of Monday, automations, integration, basically. Uh. You can think about it like an automated workflow, uh, that they build for themselves, anybody with their own business.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And we built those, all of those blocks, because our automations are AI driven. So you can do a lot of work that used to be manual, uh, used to be done by people, uh, using AI, whether it's to extract specific information, uh, from a document, all the way to auto sign new people, to different tasks based on, based on their skills or anything like that. And that actually, uh, has been like literally exploding on our platform. Just, uh, we're a public company, so I can quote what we said on the last article. Um. That grew to two hundred fifty percent Q over Q, you know, you know, something growing two hundred fifty percent Q over Q, that means, you know,

• 31:16Speaker 01

  uh, it it's growing super quickly, uh, we get crazy back and customers have been adopting more and more of those AI features. So that's one thing that we added to the platform. Um. The second thing we're doing is we have those different products, uh, Monday CRM, uh, work management, so on, um, Monday service as well. So for those, in each one of those categories, we build AI capabilities. Uh, Monday service is going to be able to auto answer, um, tickets, um, Monday CRM, uh, is going to be able to, uh, do automatic exploration emails, uh, and so on. But that's something you see in other places in the industry, and I feel we have to do it just to. Compete with other players.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And the third thing, which I'm very excited about, and really ties to Monday's vision, is we're building, just the same way you build a new board or a new dashboard in Monday, you're going to be able to build a new agent, an agent that's specific for your business. So we took the same principle of giving that superpower to our users, the same way we've done it with the Monday platform, just allow them to build their own AI bots or AI agents, if you like. So that agent not only can help you with the Monday platform, but can actually help you with your own business. So automate some of the things you do in your hotel, for example, or your shop, or your, you know, tech company,

• 32:45Speaker 01

  whatever it is, just super intuitive, easy to use, and build your own, the Monday way. So I'm very excited for this because it really ties with our vision of giving complex tools to our customers just in a very intuitive and easy to use way and allow them to build themselves. And we now going to give access to the most advanced technology to almost everybody or all of our users, which really excites me.

• 33:13Logan Bartlett?

  As you think about this move or shift to people doing work within your system, to people using your system to do work, and maybe this agentic world that we're moving towards. I'm curious, a lot of our companies are dealing with or considering the implications for a pricing standpoint. And I realize you guys are a public company and so there's only so much that you can share around this. But I'm curious how you guys, you've historically been a little more centered on seat-based pricing. Do you think that that proves to be the model going forward for you? And you just figure out some of the add-ons that are some of the agentic things

• 33:57Logan Bartlett?

  that are automations that you're going to offer as well? Or do you think that the model actually maybe shifts to more usage as perhaps less people are actually logging in on a daily basis to do the work and instead letting your system do the work for them?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually think that AI probably not gonna lead to, you know, seat compression. Maybe on some very specific tools like, you know, service oriented tools or, you know, sales oriented tools, but I don't think that's gonna lead to seat compression. However, I do, I agree that probably we need to price AI features differently based on consumption and actual usage. And I feel that's a great thing. I think, you know, the, the fact that, you know, SaaS software just align the values of customers and software makers that you can cancel anytime you have everything on the cloud. I think that, you know, consumption based pricing on AI just lead to more alignment

• 34:57Speaker 01

  between the value customers get and the company expenses and what they invest in. And I think it makes a lot of sense. I think most companies are headed towards that direction and probably something that we're gonna explore as well.

• 35:10Logan Bartlett?

  You alluded to something earlier about where product insights came from and some of the realizations that you had about the potential of Monday, perhaps coming from seeing the number of different customers that were using it for different things. I think sales and service were maybe one of the examples. I had heard you mention that a lot of the material transformative features or functionality that you built out, though, didn't come from the customers and instead came from your own intuition about what the product or the platform could do. Can you maybe speak to that and how you think about the balance of listening to your customers

• 35:53Logan Bartlett?

  versus thinking about what the future could or should look like from your own intuition?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a fine balance you need to work on because of course we listen to customers and.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  You know, process their feedback and do a lot of things that are requested by our customers. But like you said, and I've said this before, the most, you know, the most significant changes that we've done that made the most impact on our business were actually not strategic requests by our customers, but where they're us driving towards our vision. When we initially launched automations, none of our customers wanted that, like, nobody asked for that. But that was one of the most significant things we ever done. Same goes to the products, by the way. They've done it on our own platform. We've seen our customers go above and beyond building their CRM on Monday, which was marketed to them

• 36:52Speaker 01

  as a, you know, project management software. Like, why would somebody do this? And not in the hundreds, not in the thousands, in the tens of thousands. So we realized there's something here. And nobody asked for a specific project product, but we just saw what they've been doing with the platform and decided to take this a step forward. That was a huge decision on our side. You know, Monday used to be like this one tool, you know, doing that transition of moving Monday from a single tool, a single software into multi-product suite was a huge change for us. And again, it's a path that we chose and we believe in and, you know, paid off tremendously strategically.

• 37:35Logan Bartlett?

  In the early days of building the company, you guys, both co-founders, were technical by background, but I get the sense that you dove into some of these competencies that you hadn't had exposure to in the past, be it, be it marketing as one example. I'm curious how you thought about balancing, building up your own knowledge and being the, the person that became a domain expert in an area that you didn't have competency in the past versus bringing in different people to augment your knowledge?

• 38:18Logan Bartlett?

  And having trust for delegation that, you know, this isn't going to be my core competency and I'll trust other people to run whatever XYZ function and I'm just not going to go as deep into it. So I guess the question is, how did you pick what areas to go learn versus hire people in just to augment the blind spots you had?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  It's easy. We just chose to run that machine ourselves. That's

• 38:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you just do it all. I guess that's, that's what the kids are calling founder mode these days.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we are the amazing people, but we never thought it was a good idea to let somebody build what we call like a black box within the company.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And we always cared about every tiny detail, you know, I myself, we're, like I said, we're developers, but we're also obsessed with details and data. I'm not sure every manager loves that, but that's what we care about. And we also try to think from our own perspectives on what we feel is right. I would say that along the way, you know, you mentioned you saw us when you were in better adventures, but we didn't always go through the conservative path, I would say, like, you know, with performance marketing, with big brain, with the name change, with the fact we didn't have a sales team, product led growth, like, we always felt like we're misunderstood or,

• 39:48Speaker 01

  you know, people look at us like we're, you know, thinking in a different way, but we always been loyal to what we feel is right. And I think it just led us in a path that's unique to us, created a lot of opportunity for us as a company as well. This is who we are. I don't know. But You know, we're both come from developer background that we wanted to learn how to do marketing our way with code with data and analytics. And I think that what's helped create a marketing engine that's very unique.

• 40:25Logan Bartlett?

  Were there areas you hadn't teach yourself to care about or that were more like eating your vegetables versus eating dessert in some ways? Or did you find enjoyment in the totality of the operating details and things to focus on?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Um, no, I mean, we learned a lot along the way and made a lot of mistakes. Um, look, initially, um, we are like, um, going back to, you know, 2018, 2019, I thought we never gonna have a sales team within the company. Um, that was obvious to us maybe a little before. Uh, we were sure that best way to succeed is to build an amazing product and then everybody in an enterprise company is gonna adopt it. Like, we didn't know how enterprise companies work. Like, that's the main thing. We had to learn this the hard way. Like, uh, we learned that, um, you know, larger companies require different process

• 41:24Speaker 01

  of implementation, different sales process. Uh, the way we frame it to ourselves always is we need to build a bit better products for our large customers. And a better product is not just the software itself, it's also the process around it, it's the buying process, it's how you convey information to them, how you explain to them what's the value you deliver. Uh, so we always think about building products, just sometimes those products involve humans, uh, as part.

• 41:50Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, how did you ultimately find religion or change your perspective on hiring salespeople? Was it a, was it a customer? Uh, was it a executive? Or ultimately, how did you switch your perspective around it?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, we, we wanna win. Uh, we wanna be successful. Uh, we wanna build a huge company and we'll do whatever it takes. Um, and we have our strong beliefs, but sometimes we're wrong. And, um,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  You know, we'll do whatever it takes. And at some point where you realize that somebody is not working as you expected, you try to go back to all those principles and reexamine them. And we've done this several times throughout the life of the company. And now I'm super excited about the amazing sales team we have. We have almost 1,000 people in our CRO group. So it's one of the most amazing teams. I love it. I'm obsessed about it. It's, I just feel it's such, it's basically what made the company what it is today. So without it, we were totally different company.

• 42:54Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious about the the customer success side of things. So so I think you, I'd heard you read Delivering Happiness, and that proved to be pretty influential in terms of how to service customers. Can you maybe speak to to that? And the the philosophical perspective that you all have about customer service? And how you go about responding to customer requests or inquiries? Or, you know, anything along those lines?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're obsessed with delivering amazing service to our customers. It's been like this from the very beginning. I just feel eventually, when you build a, you know, an amazing software or a business, almost the only interaction the customers have with the company, which is the human interaction, is with people with customer support. Those are the people they meet. This is their perception of who the company is. And you want to have them, you want them to have the most amazing experience. So I feel that that's a major part of building a very strong brand over time. And we built a few cool things.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Maybe maybe I'll start with something a little bit unrelated, but I think it was mentioning. When we were a small company, I remember one day, like 30 people, okay, like really small. I remember one day I got a complaint about a customer support team that didn't answer a ticket within a few hours. And actually, it was a lunch break. So I went to the to their room and someone was reading, and nobody was there to answer the phone. They were all on a lunch break. And I remember asking myself, like, what happened? Like, what, how can we improve this? And You know, um, and, and at this point, I realized that we need to measure them in a better way.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  So one thing that I feel a lot of somebody misses, what do you optimize for? What is time for them to wait customer satisfaction? So we work really hard to get the KPIs right. What do we optimize for? Uh, and we have a very sophisticated system within Big Brain of measuring that our customer success is really doing the best for our customers. Because sometimes if you optimize just one metric, you get the wrong result. Because if you optimize for answering time, people might answer quickly, but inefficiently. Uh, it's the optimist for other metrics. So getting the, the right KPIs is the most important thing. And then, um, great, another thing that I'm really proud of, um, you can email directly to Roy and myself.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  So we have like email to the CEO, uh, feature, uh, which I really like. People that are frustrated or feel their, uh, doesn't get the service that they wanted. They can actually email Roy and myself and we go through those emails every day. I don't answer them directly, but I go through them. We have a team dedicated for that. Uh, it's also something that we reach out.

• 45:56Logan Bartlett?

  It makes a lot of sense and, um, I mean, it's a great principle to, to have. Uh, I think from the early days too, you guys said, set like an SLA around response time or how quickly you're going to get back to customers. Was that, was that something you had seen, uh, in the data? Or was that just a philosophy that you, you wanted to, uh, impart within the business?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  We, we said that, um, the first thing to create a great service is to answer to people quickly. That's, uh, the bare minimum we need to focus on. So that was kind of the initial metric that we tried to optimize for. And then we made it more complicated just to make sure to get, uh, the best service as well. And not just quick answering time. This was a great start to start optimizing that team, that process.

• 46:43Logan Bartlett?

  I know that you think of, uh, a bunch of elements of running the business, like shipping products. And I'm curious how that applies to things like culture. Like, how do you think about, um, setting a product ethos in different departments? And in how to make the org operate consistently from that approach?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first of all, one core principle that we always had is giving people as much ownership and autonomy as possible. So even now, with the new products that we launched, each one of those teams is independent. They make their own decisions, they have their own KPI, and they drive the company forward, which I love because we created this startup mentality within a large organization, and they're very ambitious, they're quick to respond, and they feel the ownership is on their shoulders. So I think that's something we've created that's very efficient. If you look at the sheer percentages, our R and D is relatively small compared to other companies, just in terms of expenses.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  We always believe that having a small team, it's very effective, is much better than have a lot of developers moving in very slowly. So we always optimize for talent, we always optimize for quick decision-making. I think a lot of time being wasted on choosing A or B, where I feel choosing either is good. So it's just about, let's move forward, like make a decision, you bring smart people, probably either choice is going to be great, let's move forward. So we give them the ownership, and we say, we trust you, you know, go forward. And that led to the most amazing results within the company. I think that companies begin to slow down, where you have to get management confirmation, confirmation for everything you want to do.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  So we try to avoid this as much as we can.

• 48:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I've heard the false trade-off, especially when shipping products, but I think this applies to anything, when do you want it to be high quality? Or do you want it to be fast? And I think consistently, all the best product teams or engineering organizations that I work with, they tend to ship fast, and they tend to ship high quality. And so it's this false dichotomy that we put in, that that time and quality are at odds with one another, and I assume that applies to your A or B, why not both kind of philosophy there?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the faster you ship, the faster you get feedback, the better product you create over time.

• 49:18Logan Bartlett?

  What types of people have you found to be successful within your organization? And I guess as you, as you interview or think about traits that are, that you uniquely seek out versus, versus not, that might be different than other organizations?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  I think people that like to take ownership, like to drive things forward, doesn't like to be micromanaged and want to make their own decisions are the people who forge in Monday. You know, even though we're a public company and we might look from the outside like, you know, success story. Inside internally, like we feel we're constantly failing and we feel that we haven't accomplished like 1% of our potential. So I just feel we have so much we can accomplish as a company and everybody share this thing that we're just getting started. And I love it. Like there's a feeling of, you know, we're still hungry. We have so much we can accomplish.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  I just feel we, we have so much potential that I don't want to waste. I, I feel like we were given the most amazing opportunity as a company. Even the platform, just the broad customer base, the different product suites. There's so much we can do and no one to blame, like only ourselves, like it's, it's on us to deliver. We have huge TAM, huge customer base, they love the product, almost no limitation. It's really up to our own execution. So on one hand, it's a little bit, it's a little bit nervous, but on the other hand, you control your own destiny. So I love, I love the challenge.

• 51:01Logan Bartlett?

  In, in interview settings, one of the things that, and this maybe is, is really dated. So I'll make the reference and you feel free to correct how you're doing it today. But that, that you all will ask, uh, open-ended questions to hear how people talk through or think about different problems. And one of the examples That I had heard you reference was, I think, related to the Facebook. And I think it was like a timeline or chronology of friend-related things versus maybe a more algorithmic feed in having people talk through how they would think about the trade-offs.

• 51:42Logan Bartlett?

  Can you speak to, I may maybe have the example wrong, but can you speak to maybe the interview questions or what you try to get out of a process like that?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, also interviews is something that we learn how to do the right way. I still feel we have a lot to improve, but I think traditionally, the way people interview people is they go through their CV.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I don't know, the way I experienced it is then people, you know, for 45 minutes talking about their resume. It's usually doesn't give you a lot of information about the person you're trying. And I try to avoid that. I try to minimize that part to five minutes. And then I try to ask the questions, not about their history or their work's experience, but actual questions that probably they're going to need to answer on their first day at the job.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  But I cannot ask them questions about Monday because like they have no knowledge on that. So I try to find a different product or a company that might be a consumer-oriented company that they might be using and then ask them like intuitive questions and just see how they think. And then challenge them and then see how they react to that. So learn more about their thought process and how they, you know, think and handle conflict or handle uncertainty. And that gives me a lot more information about the person as opposed to just go through their work history.

• 53:15Logan Bartlett?

  Do you uniquely take on this responsibility? Or is this something that you encourage the rest of the team to do as going through an interview process?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  No, it's something we apply throughout the company as like one of the principles that we do when we hire people.

• 53:32Logan Bartlett?

  Are there other things you've learned about the interview process or hiring from a candidate standpoint? I'm not sure if it's related to the batchable references or how to run an effective process. I trust, given your operational rigor that you thought about and maybe AD tested a bunch of different ways of going about interviewing. So I'm curious if there's any lessons there.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Look, surprisingly, I think the most important thing when you interview a person is to get, it might be not intuitive, but to get as much confidence as you can before the interview. So when we're supposed to meet somebody, we try to find as much, as many people that worked with that person before through our own network or the network of our network and try to find as much information about that person for people who actually worked with him or her before. So that gives you a lot of insight of what's working and what's not. And if you really deliberate about the questions and also find the best candidates before the interview.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  So that's something we really try to focus on in our process.

• 54:40Logan Bartlett?

  You guys went public, you said, three and a half years ago?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:43Logan Bartlett?

  Is that something you encourage other people to do? Has that been a net benefit for the business? Or is it just a stop along the way and you're indifferent to the pros and the cons of it?

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Look, I love the fact that we went public. If I had to go back in time, I would do it again. The process itself wasn't as enjoyable as you might think, but.

• 55:10Logan Bartlett?

  I've been through it as an observer, so I think it's not very enjoyable.

• 55:17Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe that the average person would think, but yes.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Uh, but I, I think being a, a public company brings a lot of benefit. I personally really love the quarterly cadence, the fact that we have to think as a quarter. I used to love board meetings, uh, before going public. And people ask me why, because it's forced me to think, it forced me to prepare, it's forced me to, um, think about our strategy. And now we need to do this in, in front of all of our investors, all of our public investors. And, you know, one thing that, uh, was, I wouldn't say surprising, but I, I send out that public investors are super sophisticated.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I, I always thought that the private investors, you know, knew exactly how SaaS companies work and really had some of the business model, but I would say public investors are as sophisticated, if not more even, uh, because they're also super interested in financial information. So for me, the whole process of learning from investors, getting feedback, um, and, and our approach, both Roy and myself, we try to learn, like genuinely learn from people and we ask investors, what can we do better? What are we doing wrong? We don't try to appear as somebody who has all the answers, but rather that we on a learning process. And I feel this builds a lot of confidence and also help really help us in our journey as a public company.

• 56:47Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting. I, I think some of the, the smartest people are public market investors. And so I, I, I, I agree with your sentiment that there was, there was probably 10 years ago when the SaaS, there were, there were maybe or 12 years ago or 15, whatever it was, when there were six or eight SaaS businesses and most of them were kind of enterprise oriented, uh, that there was just a lack of appreciation or understanding for some of the things related to how to build SaaS businesses. And so the private market had a much deeper appreciation or understanding of all that stuff. But now I don't know if it's 75 or 80 or, or 65 or whatever the number is, but there's, there's so many,

• 57:29Logan Bartlett?

  uh, data points out there and the public market is just so attuned to the, the different changes that occur in these businesses and they're just very good pattern matchers against all that stuff. And so I, I find them to be super sophisticated in terms of their understanding and, and, uh, observations around detail and all that.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent agree.

• 57:50Logan Bartlett?

  Have you found that that there's been more of a short term focus in the the public markets? Or have you been able to balance kind of the medium term objectives with with with the near term? And the expectation setting with your your public investors now?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  That was actually not a surprise for me because

• 58:12Speaker 01

  like all the investors that we talk with are all long term. And you know, even now, the less earned call our stock actually went down after the article. And I was surprised, we got great feedback from investors, long term investors. And they really kind of look at the business, what's working. So a lot of them really focus on the long term and we got great feedback from them. So I just feel that, you know, similarly to a private company, as a public company also. Obviously, you get the hedge funds, you get the retail investors you have control on and they see kind of short term gains.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of long term investors, great ones that really supportive and can hold for the long term. They understand the strategy, they care about the product, they care about the vision.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  And that was, you know, great to see in our journey as a public company.

• 59:09Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that became evident to me in prepping for this, as well as this discussion is just how how detail oriented you and Roy seem to be and just the operating rigor that you have for the for the business. I'm interested, is that something that you've always been? And does that date back to to you as a kid? Did you have like a meticulously clean room? And you know, you were always on top of all this stuff, homework done well in advance of it being due? Or is that something you've learned professionally to be to focus on?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Look, if you ask my mom, my room was not clean, but my folders and my computer were very tight. So I organize what I care about. But I don't know, I take joy out of making this machine, this company more efficient. It just. Feel satisfying to know that we're doing something right. It feels satisfying. We have the saying here that we love to hear problems. Worrying myself, we love to hear problems. We love to touch problems. We love to go deep. And that just encourage everybody on every level to share what's not working.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  I think a lot of companies, they have this tendency to ignore problems and they tend to grow over time and become serious problems. And I think one of the things that really help us scale and grow is that we always try to figure out what's not working. And once we do, we have this sense that we can fix it, whether it's big or small. So we get excited. Having some scientific problems is weird as it may sound.

• 1:00:57Logan Bartlett?

  I'm interested, you all have a bunch of data that you run the business on and metrics that you track. How many metrics do you think about on a daily basis? Are there, is it, is it six KPIs that you sort of use as the North Star? And then another 150 that fall out of it? Or do you track 30 as kind of the core framework by which you run the business on a daily basis?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually Big Brain built its own mobile app. It's called Monday Morning. It's a tool we use internally that people have on their mobile. And you can see in real time on all the main KPIs. So I would say on a daily basis, I'd probably track around 10 to 15 main KPIs. But this app, and you know, if you go on Big Brain on your laptop computer, you can kind of drill down to anything you like. So if something is outgrowing as we expected, we can drill down and see the information. Different teams focus on different types of the business.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  But usually on a day-to-day basis, we try to kind of share the high-level KPIs. Actually, when we were a private company, we used to send everybody at the company a daily SMS with all the information about what happened last night. And all of our investors got the same SMS every morning. That's one of the best things we've done. And nobody was surprised in the end of the quarter. Nobody was surprised before the board meeting, full transparency with your investors. And it's one of the things that's really, I'm proud of. And I think you traded the very efficient board for us over.

• 1:02:44Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think that led to better accountability within the organization? I can imagine that could be a little anxiety inducing in different organizations, but it sounds like you guys found a way to just be transparent and upfront about it.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I think being transparent removes anxiety because anxiety comes from problems and problems you don't fix. Not because something happens, even to the best company, if you have bad orders, you have bad years, you have bad month, nobody's perfect. But the fact that it's out there and you talk about it and you fix it just reduces the anxiety. So I just feel that being transparent and, you know, immediate in how you tackle things and fix them just removes the anxiety.

• 1:03:28Logan Bartlett?

  You're one of the few public companies that I know of that has involved with a co-CEO model. How have you been able to make the partnership work as well as it has? Are you 12 years in now? 11, something like that?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  12.

• 1:03:50Logan Bartlett?

  12. Do you guys end up dividing different functional areas of responsibility? Or do you both oversee the entirety of the areas within the organization? How does that work?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yes. First of all, Roy, my partner is really the most amazing partner I could hope for. And when we started a company, originally he was the CEO and I was the CTO, although he's as technical as I am. But

• 1:04:18Logan Bartlett?

  How did you guys land on that, by the way?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  It was just, he started a few months before me. So, and we didn't care. So we just said, okay, let's do it this way. And, but I remember the first week, he told me, Elano, I want us to do everything together. And I said, of course, we're co-founders. They said, no, no, no, I want us to do everything together. It's like CEOs. And I said, okay, and that's because I stood in my character as well. And what's so special about Roy? A lot of things, but he doesn't have any ego, like he doesn't care about himself. He cares that the company is going to be successful. That's something I always appreciated about him. It's not about himself, it's about the company.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  And that also made me let go of my own ego. And I said, look, I'll do everything with you, and I don't care about the time. Whatever you want, we'll do it together. And we've done this. And you know, it's funny, because in the early days, we were the media investors, maybe like people in your team. And we were confused then, because you know, I sometimes might talk about the business model. And Roy will talk about technical part. But he was officially CEO, I was officially CTO. And I saw their confused look on their face. And then after a few years, we decided to make it official to be co-CEOs. But it's been like this from day one. And look, I really feel it's like a hack that we have

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  on building companies, because we shared the burden, we talk about everything, we talk hours every day. We actually both live next to the office, we walk home almost every day, we talk for hours and hours.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  And I just feel, you know, I shared the burden with somebody. I'm not alone. A lot of people describe being a CEO as a very lonely job. And we're not lonely. We got each other. And the greater the shift. So I just feel it's a huge benefit. And also, when we go to investor conferences, we, one of the only companies that have two rooms, so we meet twice the amount of investors.

• 1:06:26Logan Bartlett?

  You can divide and conquer. It sounds like you do everything together, minus you can divide and conquer a little bit on the investor and the investor conversations. I guess I didn't have this in my research, but how, so how did you, how did you two get to know each other originally?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I actually knew Roy since I was eighteen. We were in the same unit in the diligence force. He's actually five years older than me, so he actually recruited me. To the team, was part of the team. And we both started before Monday and we kind of talked throughout the years, but then eventually we decided to do something together as co-founders after like 10 years that we know each other.

• 1:07:06Logan Bartlett?

  Are there any lessons from your co-founding journey that you would impart to people that are listening? Either have already started a business with with an existing co-founder, or maybe thinking about starting a company and evaluating who the right co-founder should be?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think eventually a lot of companies fail because of sounder relationship.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  And people, I think, undervalue how much this is important because it's such a significant part of making a company successful on scale, this relationship. And because of the fact we were both without ego, the fact that we care about the company being successful, and we knew what we care about. When we built the company, we were very aligned with you today. I think that really helped us go through. And we went through a lot, you know, ups and downs and hard times and good times. But we, our relationship's always been very stable. And I think that really gives us a lot of confidence towards the future as well.

• 1:08:08Logan Bartlett?

  One of the good things and potentially bad things about these these podcast platforms is they they're fairly persistent. And so I think this is going to be up on YouTube or Apple Podcasts or Spotify for for a while. If someone's listening to this in five years' time, where do you hope Monday is from a business standpoint? What do you hope to be accomplishing that you could maybe call your shot now, November of 2024?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  But I'm not the best person to predict the future, but.

• 1:08:47Logan Bartlett?

  You've done a good job with Monday, or at least building towards the future in some way. So you're as good as any.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what we aim for as a company.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Look, Monday have built this amazing platform. We're very proud of. It's very unique. And we built those products on top of it. Eventually, I see a future where companies buy Monday for their business and run the core of what drives their business on Monday. Whether it's work management, CRM, dev service, another tool. And by doing that, the compounded, the compound value of using different tools from the same vendor just releases so much information, creates everything much more smooth between different software. A lot of the information, if you think about today, is siloed. If you use Salesforce, for example, and Zendesk and Jira,

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  you know, great platform, but eventually they'll communicate with one another and data is captured inside of it. We're doing each one. And Monday really liberates that information and make everything accessible across all tools. And on top of that, everything is so flexible. So it truly suits your business. So definitely see a future where, you know, companies be horse wall by Monday and use it throughout their company. And on top of that, definitely AI is going to be a major part of that. So I feel Monday has one of the biggest potential to be a significant driver in AI adoption for our own customers. So I see a future where a lot of the work has been done using AI on Monday. Other work has been managed on our different products and companies literally run on Monday.

• 1:10:24Logan Bartlett?

  Well, as we, as we wrap here, I, one last one for you. I'm curious if, if there's a piece of, of conventional wisdom, either in Silicon Valley or about operating companies that you hear espoused from, from, I don't know, DCs, people with podcasts or, or anyone else's blogs that, that you disagree with, or you just found to be fundamentally untrue. Are there any counterintuitive things that stand out to you that, that, that you disagree with?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Well, a lot, but I would say my main one is that.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  It's something I mentioned before, but failing is one of the most amazing things that you can do as a person and as a company. And failing often makes you perfect over time. And this is something that I not only do myself, but also is a key and core part of our company DNA. And we encourage people to try and fail. And we said to them, like, we're behind you. We trust you. Failing is part of the process of making the most terrific company. And let's just continue and fail until we, um, it's a few.

• 1:11:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Well, that's great. Aaron, thanks for doing this. It was great to have you on and yeah, really appreciate you making it happen.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:11:51Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for joining the Logan Bartlett Show with co-founder and co-CEO of Monday.com, Aaron Zinman. If you enjoyed this discussion, I'd really appreciate it if you subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on, as well as share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. We look forward to seeing you back here next week with another great guest on the Logan Bartlett Show. Have a great weekend, everyone.