As the CEO of FirstHive, Aditya Bhamidipaty and his team built a B2C marketing automation platform that unifies customer interactions across all channels. From social media to email marketing to websites, and from anonymous conversations to post-login conversations, Aditya knows that every customer interaction counts. 

Join Jim and Aditya as they dive into the difficulties and opportunities of delivering consistent brand messaging across all customer touch points. 

3 Key Takeaways

• Harnessing Top Talent for Long-Term Organizational Success: Entrepreneurs often struggle with creating a strong culture and aligning their team with their mission. The people you surround yourself with can make all the difference in the success and longevity of your organization. Do you see yourself collaborating with your core team for the next, say, five to ten years?  If so, consider providing equity to your employees.  By offering company shares as part of employees’ compensation packages, you’ll promote a sense of ownership and accountability.
• Know Your Customers:  When you have a deep understanding of your consumers, you can engage with them in a more relevant and meaningful manner.  This allows you to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time through their preferred communication channels.  
• If You Don’t Control Your Customer Data, You Don’t Control Your Customer’s Experience: The data landscape is cluttered with dozens of providers that essentially own various data points of your customer data. If you don’t shed some of those providers, and consolidate your customer data, you’ll always struggle to control the experiences your customers have with your products and services. 

Resources

FirstHive, a marketing platform that delivers real-time analytics and executes cross-channel campaigns: www.firsthive.com 

Aditya Bhamidipaty on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityabhamidipaty/ 

About Our Guest 

Aditya is the founder and CEO of FirstHive. Aditya started his career with P&G and worked in Europe with iGate. His previous experience also includes co-founding Emart Solutions, a leading customer experience and loyalty agency in India. He did his MBA from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad. He loves playing cricket, coaching kids in soccer, and going on hikes with his boys.

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/ 

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All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

Aditya Bhamidipaty 0:02

The whole philosophy behind first time is actually, it's a very, very first principles based approach the first type takes the principle is actually really simple. The concept is that if you know the consumer better, you can talk more relevant stuff to the consumer. And if you're able to identify and have these conversations, irrespective of where the consumer touches you, you're essentially meaningful and consistent and coherent in all your conversations as a brand with the consumer. And if you're meaningful, coherent and consistent, and if you're talking with relevance, because you know the consumer, there is a higher likelihood of an outcome from those conversations, which is a transaction growth experience, and so on.

Jim Barnish 0:47

Welcome to another compelling episode of the dirt, where we delve into the real grime and grit of growing a business. I'm your host, Jim barnish. And I would like to give a brief shout out to our sponsor, orchid Black, who just has such a passion for partnering with businesses to drive profitable and sustainable growth like we try to push here on the dirt, which is that kind of same spirit of which we bring you these stories from business leaders navigating entrepreneurship. Our guest today truly knows the meaning of navigating such complex terrains. He is Aditya Varma, the body founder and CEO of first hive a customer data platform enabling consumer markets and brands to take control of their first party data. In today's episode, we're going to discuss customer data trends, the art of embracing equity, and the nuances of creating a culture across a global organization. We'll also get to learn from Aditya his experiences in recruiting the right and at times the wrong talent. But before we begin, I'd love to invite you to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. Not only does this ensure you won't miss an episode, but your support also allows us to keep unearthing the truth about business growth like Aditya is welcome to the show on it. Yeah. Let's take it from the top and bring us back to the early days.

Aditya Bhamidipaty 2:24

Good. Thanks, Jim. It's, it's fun to be on this and big fan. So happy to be here. The first type of story in many ways started with me. You know, having this really interesting aha moment way back when first I wasn't even in the picture when I was working with Procter and Gamble. And I remember seeing this Gillette razor on the aisle of a store and thinking, you know, the Gillette razor says I'm a great brand to everybody who walks by. But what if it could say, Hey, welcome back. It's the 15th anniversary of your first shave, right? And and if it could do that, what is a broadcast conversation for a brand suddenly transforms into a communication, a conversation between a brand and the consumer. And that can just completely unlock a relationship and growth for the brand and also experience for the consumer. That was the I would say the earliest seed of what I think eventually grew into becoming first hive. In my mind. That's interesting. There's a lot more experiences that added to it. But that when I think about it was the first kind of moment that that this idea kind of came to mind.

Jim Barnish 3:39

Yeah, so let's talk about that. And I want to I want to go back in time a little bit shortly here. And the audience needs to learn about your great track record in building and growing companies before first time, but but since we're on first I first in your in your experience at p&g. Like, what? So what is first time? And and? And what does? How does that how does that apply to really everything that you've done?

Aditya Bhamidipaty 4:06

First type is a unified customer experience platform that we take to large consumer enterprises. In the enterprise world today, especially in the consumer enterprise world, there are typical enterprise has over 90 different tools and interfaces where they engage with consumers or they have some store of data. And because of how cluttered and scattered this data landscape is, enterprises struggle to get control on their customer experience. They struggle to get control on the overall experience that the platforms can deliver for them in terms of real time personalized engagement with customers. And that is really where first hive comes in. First type allows enterprises to really ingest from this entire wide landscape of all of the different tools. We then Use our algorithms to connect all of the data that's coming in. And then we really make sure that it's presented together for the enterprise to drive, insights, analytics, and really a connected customer experience. In many ways, first hive is really future proofing these enterprises in their path to what we believe is the future, which is enterprises becoming autonomous as far as marketing and data ops are concerned, where you really get a system of intelligence that cannot deliver a baseline performance, for enterprises on their customer experience in marketing.

Jim Barnish 5:36

And where does that fit? What does that fit into the way that these companies are currently viewing the single lens of the customer, if you will, like is, are you having to educate the market? Is the market already really well aware with lots of players? Like, where's the where's the current market? Sit in what you do?

Aditya Bhamidipaty 5:59

Yeah, no, that's an that's a great question. The, the need of getting to a single customer view, I think, has been felt by Enterprises for a long time. And they've been, you know, multiple, let's say, waves of attempts at solving this problem for the enterprise. Whether it is CRMs, or even automation, marketing, automation tools that came at it, have had approaches to get to this holy grail of single customer view. Right? The The challenge, though, was a lot of these tools were structurally flawed on two accounts, one, most of them would look at existing customers or not prospect data. And two, they would always, almost always deal with customer data, which had known contact vector like an email or a mobile number attached to that. So when you have multiple sources pushing out a record, let's say, you know, you get Jim's information from five different sources. As long as they have email or mobile or gym, you the stools are essentially doing glorified VLOOKUP. They're matching the data and saying, Okay, this is all, Jim. But today's world, you're not always carrying your pie on your sleeve. When you have a conversation with a brand, you have multiple devices, you have multiple identities. A lot of the times you're having anonymous conversations, you don't always have post login conversations. So you could be an existing customer, but you could be having an anonymous in conversation with the brand. All of that volume of data is what the existing landscape does not have the ability to deal with. And in fact, in a lot of cases, it does not even bring that data back in for the enterprise to learn from, it's almost lost. And that is really where a tool like first half steps in, we, we had actually rolled out one of the first probabilistic models on identity matching, we do one of the most comprehensive identity graphs with a five tiered layer, layered graph that we deliver to enterprises. And that is really where the difference of first half comes in. The problem is a known problem. In fact, if you look at any large company today, and you look at their annual reports, you will see that delivering unified customer experience is almost always the number one growth priority for a lot of these enterprises. And it's an ongoing challenge, despite all of the tools. And in fact, that's the reason we exist, because it's a complex scattered landscape with disconnected stacks.

Jim Barnish 8:30

Interesting, yeah. And can you share a little bit more about the identity classes of customers that first hive helps marketers to create? And, and how this how you guys are able to help provide this this edge over traditional customer segmentation methodology?

Aditya Bhamidipaty 8:50

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The whole philosophy behind first hive is actually, it's a very, very first principles based approach that first five takes the principle is actually really simple. The concept is that if you know the consumer better, you can talk more relevant stuff to the consumer. And if you're able to identify and have these conversations, irrespective of where the consumer touches you, you're essentially meaningful and consistent and coherent in all your conversations as a brand with the consumer. And if you're meaningful, coherent and consistent, and if you're talking with relevance, because you know, the consumer, there is a higher likelihood of an of a outcome from those conversations, which is a transaction growth experience, and so on. And that is really what first I've focuses on. So we really process everything from your text, images, voice to transaction data, to all of the behavioral events that come in for an enterprise. So we can process data from over 700 different you know, sources of data tools and systems. And from all of these we we use our, our identity matrix to actually create the A granular identity for every consumer, then you have the entire behavioral models to actually create segments recommendations on where you're likely to respond, what is your content affinity, and so on and so forth. And that is where the segmentation comes in. Now, historically, and this is this is the direction in which we believe enterprises are headed further from an autonomous standpoint, which is where first time comes in as the platform of choice. Historically, marketers are used to delivering campaigns, which are channel focused, so majority of the success would be success KPIs that they would attract would be, I'm sending out an email, am I? How many opens? Am I getting? How many clicks Am I getting? Or you're pushing out an ad? How many clicks Am I getting? How many people are coming to my website, and then how many checkup? So a lot of the campaigns that are sent out, the metrics of success are really channel centric metrics. Very few enterprises today start off saying, I have 25 million consumers for this Thanksgiving offer, which are the 700,000 consumers, I need to respond for this offer. That is not the conversation that you start with, you start with saying, I'm going to send out emails, I'm going to send out texts I'm going to send out offers on my web, and each one has metrics, right? When the first time comes in, is to really flip it on its head and say, Look, now that we understand your consumer, we will allow the platform to really help you deliver the right audience for the objective that you have. And then for each of those audience, you don't have to start with broadcast where, you know, you send out one message to everybody on a channel, and then you try and nurture that. Instead, if let's say you and I are both on, are identified as potential target for a campaign, you might respond better on a mobile notification, whereas I might respond better on let's say, an email. So it does not have to be two different campaigns. It's part of the same campaign, but the machine is optimizing your preference and my preference for what content? What channel, what time of night, you might get a message now, I might get a message on Friday evening, because that is optimized for my response. So can the machine do that? Absolutely. Because it sees the wealth of information that exists on all of your transaction history, all of the look alikes that exist within my other customers, for me to be able to predict when are you most likely to respond for this context of objective could be an education could be a transaction knowledge, and so on, and so forth. That is what a first I've aims to do, which is to really come in as the brain in the body for the enterprise, and really orchestrating that entire unified customer experience for the brand.

Yeah, that really is flipping it on its head. And I want to go back to some of the things that you've done over the course of your career, because I feel like a couple of things. Number one, you're you're kind of a master of flipping things on their head, you've kind of consistently done that throughout your career. And also, this is kind of the world that you've lived in. So this is not a new problem to you. Ever since the PNG days, like this is something that that you've understood, and you've experienced. And so I just like to talk a little bit about that. You mentioned PNG, between PNG and first time what was, you know, what, what did life look like for you?

Yeah, I mean, I started my career right out of school with PNG, that was an incredible experience with what is probably considered the best marketing org in the world. It was an incredible few years at PNG. And then I moved to Europe, where I was leading Europe for a few verticals, retail telecom manufacturing with one of the system integrators and that was a 180 for me personally, because I went from a large brand to a small system integrator, selling large brands to you know, being in a very, very competitive, almost commoditized category of technology solutions. And, and, you know, selling to enterprises versus selling a consumer product, you know, products at png. So, it was a lot of learning curve for me, post which I then went to India, to, to co found a company, which was an agency in the mark, a marketing agency and which was tech enabled. And there we built it as one of the leading players in customer experience and loyalty in the country servicing over 100 customers across again, industry CPG and banking, finance insurance. So that and so again, got a very very ringside perspective to what happens in the actual execution, and how what I thought was a lot of money was left on the table, because enterprises would spend enormous amount of resources to drive a particular campaign. And then a lot of the data that would just that would get generated, either was they were not able to bring it take that back in or But it was just left because they didn't know what to do with it. And there was no ability that existed to use that information back to nurture those relationships that they were building. And then they would start the cycle all over again. And therefore the ROI is, I felt had tremendous opportunity for uplift. And that is where, you know, we started with First I've ever said, every brand interaction with a consumer, there's an explosion of insights. Right? So our project name for first time was actually God, G, A WD, not the God but GA WD. Pattern God, but we called it a good analyzer of wide data, which is we said, if you have the right antenna to bring those insights into the enterprise, you can unlock information, but if you don't have the right antenna, it's all white noise, right? It's lost forever. So, so that's, that's how first started.

That's really interesting. Yeah, and, and, you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs and founders out there that are just getting started, most of you listening are probably a little bit further in your journey. But, you know, everyone tends to struggle, in creating a strong culture in, in, in getting people aligned to their mission. And I know that, that you've had really great experience in getting really great people to join your mission. So I'm just curious, like, you know, like, how do you how do you attract top talent to join you at first time?

No, I, you know, I think that is probably one of the most important ongoing challenges that any enterprise I think, at various stages continues to face. Because it's, it's always the people that make the difference. I've been lucky, in the sense that I, you know, I've, I have a very good founding team that was there with me from day one or first time. And they were also there with me in my previous startup. So that, you know, that gave me a very, very strong core in the company, around which we could then build a lot of culture. And, and because we have now worked for many years, there is a tremendous amount of trust and understanding that we have in terms of how we operate. One of the core philosophies, for me, at least on organization building has been that we wanted to build an organization that would last we were not building this for the short term. You know, whatever happens, I mean, you know, we might end up taking a having Quick Exit options, we might go in IPO, all of those are things that we will make choices as we go down. But when we were building the organization, we built it with the philosophy that we're building an organization to last. And, and for that, having a high integrity, transparent environment was a was, I think, a critical necessary factor. And so we often talk about the principle of, of, of Therma, inside the company, where we say, every individual is a manifestation of the organization itself within their role. And so you don't need to tell somebody what to do and what not to do, we cannot approach it from the perspective of lack of trust that if unsupervised, you will not perform, we take it the other way, which is that look, once you come in our role as an organization is to empower you with information to equip you with tools, and to ensure that we have provided you the clarity of where the organization is headed. So that once you're there, once you understand this in your role, you're able to wield your authority and your intelligence to take the right decisions for the organization, as though you're the organization yourself. Right. And, and that's a tough philosophy, sometimes we keep reinforcing it, it's not easy for people to understand that. And what we also learned is, it's as part of the journey, they're always, you know, categories, folks, all kinds of folks that participate in your journey, some folks who are committed to the long term, and some are really smart, but join you for a part of the journey. And both have the role to play and both have the the ability to leave a mark and legacy and the, you know, of themselves on the organization. So how do we allow them to be able to do their best and, and so that is really always been the attempt, and we continue to learn in that journey. I won't say we figured it out. I think that's the intent.

That's a good intent. What what I'm like what are the consistencies of no matter what the position what makes a good hire for first time?

So there are two three core values that I think we really be really cared about. One is someone who takes honest responsibility for the for the task, right and A good example here is like the soldier on a battlefield, right? The soldier on the battlefield has a clear objective, right? I mean, you know, let's say they're on the border and the see the enemy, their objective is to protect the motherland from the enemy, right? You don't give them a cheat sheet to say hold the rifle, like there is at 32 degrees angle, click twice, you don't give that cheat sheet, what you tell them is protect the border. So in many ways that that sense of ownership is what we want, they need to understand the purpose and then be able to do what is right, that they believe is right. And as long as our value systems are aligned, they will do the right things. And they could be learning involve data. So ownership is an extremely important thing. Second, is integrity. Because ownership with integrity really does the magic. And third is really care about outcomes for the customer. Because I think the only way you have a sustainable org is when customers succeed and your team succeeds is when the organization succeeds. So, and sustainability organization of the organization is implicitly built in into the success of the customer. Because if you are critical to the customer success, your sustainability becomes part of the success of the customer. And those three, therefore are very intrinsically linked. And so we want our team members to be always focused on customer success, whoever it be in whichever part of the team so I think these three are essential behaviors or right attitudes.

Yeah, that's good. That's good. When you think about a standout hire, right? Someone that is significantly contributed to first hives mission, I'm sure that you've got a bunch. But but can you share a specific story about someone in particular, you don't need to name any names, but you're more than welcome to, and how that person just completely contributed to first time submission?

Sure, I can. I can name two people, at least. And then I'm not going to talk about some of the folks who have always been there. And I won't name people. But there are, at least to the top of mine company we had one of the one of the team members that we brought in to lead sales for us, for example, in a region helped us really step jump, the way we do our go to market. And in many ways, the impact has been such that there's a before and after quality of motion, right. And that is something that you see. And usually when people create that kind of an impact, that impact is not a slow burn, it's it starts right up as soon as they join the mission. And you know, they really drive everybody around them, they set high expectations and standards for everybody. So that is that is something that happened. Another really strong partner who's been there with us pretty much from day one is his individual who's who leads our support, incredible discipline, I mean, he's you can set your clock looking at the way what time he turns up, how we deliver stuff is just incredible. It doesn't matter if the deliverable ends at 5am. In the morning, it will be in your inbox, right? So it's one of those things that is one of them, personally, is one of the most disciplined, dependable person I have known in my entire life across all of the different expenses. I've never known anybody so discipline and so incredibly passionate about quality of deliverable. You know, when you commit to something, how do you deliver on it? So some of these folks really then have a rubber band effect right on everybody else on the organization, they really improve the overall quality of the organization, right. Similarly, we have we have one of the Faggin founding team members who has been there who takes on huge number of responsibilities, like he's almost like our go to person, anywhere, anything, we need somebody to give a direct supervision, that is a person we go to and say, Hey, can you take a look at this? And, you know, we've never had him say, No, I can't or No, I found no matter what it is, because he just saw he's so aligned to this, the purpose of the arc. So we have a lot of such interesting, folks. Otherwise, it's a tough mission. I mean, as a young startup is not a place that gives you the benefits. It's not it's a place that really takes more from you than it gives initially. Yeah, takes enormous amount of passion, commitment, and, you know, and drive to really want to be part of a young startup.

Well, that's that's that's well said. And with First I've being a global organization now. You know, what, what challenge has had what challenges have you encountered in creating but also maintaining a unified culture as you guys grew up?

That's still early days for us. As you know, we started our operations in the US last year. So it's still it's still early days in that sense. And it's a small team that we have globally versus India. But you know, I think some of the our processes that we have help in reinforcing what we can talk at the time of recruiting people, because at the time of recruitment, whatever we say, eventually, the rubber hitting the road is what they experience once they come in. And, you know, we have a process called the Open House, which we do every week, it's a town hall. It's similar to a town hall, we do it every week, we have peer nominations, celebrating success, or celebrating any positive impact, really, we have function heads who come in and talk about what they did last week, and so on. So and, you know, as a founder, CEO, I take questions, anybody has any questions, any input suggestions, so, this, we've been religiously doing it for the last at least 40 months, without fail every Friday. And I think some of these processes go some distance and reinforcing some of these cultural things. But, you know, it's a constant effort, I don't think I mean, one of the things I realized now is in my MBA, I should have paid more attention to OB classes. Culture is the most important thing. And it's not easy to it's something that you learn on the job.

Yeah, and it's not a buzzword, right. It's, it's, it's, it's more about the way that you that you live, that you live your life, and that you drive your organization, it's not just having a pool table, or, you know, having a really a really cool outing. It's it's the things that you do to maintain unity, and and the way you hire to your values, like you mentioned before, things like that. So on that same note, you know, we've all made hiring mistakes, right? And some of us learn from those. Some of us don't, I know, I'm probably somewhere in the middle, do you? Can you just share, like, some sort of learning experience from a hiring mistake that you've made in the past,

we've made quite a few mistakes. So you know, we're all, we all go through the experience where we are dazzled by people in the interviews, but then, you know, subsequently realized that it's not a fit, whether it is competence, or culture. And we've had both scenarios where, you know, the competence is, I would say, an easier thing to deal with, because you know, then you can, you can figure out, hey, can we support the person, coach them, train them, upgrade their skills, but it's the culture, the attitude issues, which are a lot more tougher to deal with. And, you know, there's a very interesting Australian saying, and I'm going to give you a my word summary of it, but it really says that, look, if you have a circle of trust, you have to have an extremely high bar of intolerance for anybody who breaks trust. Otherwise, it's poison, right? And something to that effect. And those are things that we've learned the tough way, right, it's one thing to be to be driven by good value systems. But this the enforcement, the boundary conditions have to be very, very strongly enforced, or what is acceptable and not acceptable. Otherwise, you end up setting very long precedences. And you allow, you know, unacceptable behaviors to creep in into the organization, which then confuse everybody else of is this what we are now. So I think we've had those scenarios. Another Another thing that we've learned along the way is, you know, trust has to be also earned. Especially if you're bringing in folks with who can who have more authority and influence, like, if you do middle or senior hires, then they have to demonstrate that they're fitting in before we give them more authority without limiting their ability to do their job well, or to be able to influence or affect, you know, deliver on their priorities. And so that is another thing that we are learning we are getting better at, I think, but those are some of the areas that we've had learning so

I want to dig into that last one a little bit because it's interesting, right? Usually, you know, the way that you eloquently said that about having people come in and earn or in earn their way despite having a an amazing background or you know, a lot of experience and and despite you hiring them for that executive role. Gotta kind of earn their right to influence in a more meaningful way. Hey, do you mind is Ken, do you have like an example that you can speak to there? Because that's that one's really that one's really interesting. I think people can learn a lot from this one.

Yeah, I mean, I can, I can tell you one of the one of the things stuff with one of the hires that we had a few years back, we were very eager to get somebody to lead that function, because we were growing rapidly, and we needed more competence. One of the things in a startup is initially, you have people who can take on more generalist responsibilities, because they're double and triple adding, as you grow, you start getting more specialists, and you want people who have gone deeper into it. So we brought in this VP into into this function, and, you know, came in and realized, and this person had worked with larger organizations prior to that, and that was probably oversight, Miss from our side, our side on figuring out whether we were he he would have fit in well, in a younger, more fragile, more, less a fluid environment as a startup was compared to the larger structure dark. So there were a lot of changes that you would recommend. And immediately, it meant a lot of tools that we needed to buy a lot of investments that were asked for a lot of people, and then the complexity and the space at which the organization were growing interest in. Couldn't keep pace. And so in, I think about four months, we parted ways. And we were left holding all of the changes or design changes, investments and tools and all of that, that we had made to back the person that we had brought in. Right. But so what we learned from that was that if people are not committed for the long term, they take no responsibility or ownership for what what calls they're taking, and they don't see it through. And then as an org, we cannot mold ourselves to the individual. Because, you know, till they have proven themselves to be participative to be participating in the long term success of the organization. So they have to, I think that is one of the things that I think we've gotten better at, we will do incremental stuff, but any discontinuous stuff, people have to earn that trust for us to be able to do that, because then we are backing them for the long term. And they are we know that they are part of this for the long term. There is no definitive way of assessing these two, and therefore it's an organizational memory that works. It's a gut that works. And that is where, you know, there's always a scope for misses, but I think that's one of the things that we're trying to get better at. And certainly we've gotten better in the last few years.

That's great. Yeah, what what advice would you give to, to other entrepreneurs to other business owners about avoiding or we're learning from their hiring mistakes?

You know, generally, advice is pretty presumptuous, because it kind of makes you feel like you know, a lot. The fact is we very much in our own learning phase. I will just say that one of the things that I often do in a lot of the important hires is to be very clear about the fact that this is a challenging environment, because it's going to demand a lot of people and they have to be okay with the pace at which we want things to be done. We are also we also require, especially in first time, at least, that's something that's very intrinsic to our culture, we expect people to operate in the spirit of the purpose rather than the written word of what your KR is. The KERS are important, but the KERS are intended to be the, the support, they are not the limitation of what you will do or think about there to help demystify a fuzzy cloud into words and keywords, right. But there is the purpose which is the fuzzy cloud and and we expect people to be comfortable working on the purpose of the organization, which means that you have to be okay with dealing with a certain amount of chaos, a certain amount of stretch a certain amount of, you know, double Hattingh because we we only have so much capacity in a growing arc. And you know, we used to see these I don't know if it is there in any of these Avenger movies, but you know, in those old mythological movies, you would see that you know, you have the bad guy who's throwing a weapon. Let's say it's a fire weapon, then you throw a water weapon against it, right? That's that's really why we're startup is you get challenges and then you look inside and you say, Okay, where is the competence to take on this opportunity, and you want the best competence to take on the right opportunity. And so we want to be able to work together like that. And so so people who are extremely good In structured environments, sometimes may not really succeed in our kind of an environment where we expect people to step up and do more than just one roll task or one roll or one carry. And so we're very categorical as to why do you want to join us we are, we are now less eager to get people in than we were a few years back. Because we we understand that it has a larger impact. If you get the wrong people, it's okay to not have the person than to get somebody who's not a fit.

I have this visual in my head as you were talking about, you know, almost like a, like a Pokemon game not to bring in Marvel like, you know, a water animal versus a Lanois.

elementals now, right, like water and fire. Yeah, fire people at water people. Yeah, it's really like that, I think, you know, you have, you're constantly, you know, my favorite refrain is that little being in a startup is like being the cat and the shooting, or to experiment with both constantly dead and alive, you have lots of opportunity for growth, but you're lots of challenges and threats. And it's a, it's, you got to find find the path to get to greatness. So we

have nine lives and you need all of those nine lives as you do. One thing that we talked about previously, is this idea of embracing equity. What is what is embracing equity mean to you as a as a founder and CEO?

It's, uh, you know, the policies of the organization have nothing to do with the, with the personal context of the individual and have only to do with the purpose of the arc. And like I said, I mean, the competence to the opportunity, right? It has nothing else. But what is the right? What do we say, the right capability that you throw at the right problem, right? Everything else is meaningless. And if you're really trying to truly build a successful org, every every participant in that is an asset, right? And you want to make sure that you are giving each asset of yours the opportunity to perform for the organization at the best of their abilities. And because because you've brought them in, it means that you know that they are they have the capability to contribute. Now, once you brought people in, you've done all the assessment before they're inside the door. But once they are inside the door, there is no further figuring out, are they right, not right and so on, you want them to blossom and do the right things, you know, the best that they can. So I think equity is intrinsic into a design like that, where the criteria do not consist of anything to do with the individual's personal context, it has only to do with the capability and the opportunity. And that's a very, that's, you know, then it just becomes agnostic to everything else. And that's, I think, the most equitable structure that there is, because it's fair to the collective responsibility that everybody's carrying, and it's fair to the individual.

Yeah, can you can you share any any steps that that first I have has made, or has taken to foster equity within the organization?

Oh, I don't know, I'm thinking.

I don't think we have to, we have to necessarily, we never felt the need to explicitly take any unique steps, you know, if you if you know what I mean. It's just how we operate. It's always been how we operate. So there was never anything, there was never anything that we felt that we had to uniquely kind of step up and do something different. Also, I think somewhere this comes from the context in which we, we started, right, a lot of our operation started in India, where, which is just intrinsically such a diverse place, right? I mean, we have people working towards speak multiple languages, people who can't understand each other's languages, people who can't read each other's scripts, people come from different places. So 30 40% of our I think 40% of our workforce is women. So this, I mean, it's a fairly diverse environment. And so to us, that was always like a given it was not something that we had to step out and say, Oh, this is something different that we have to address. It's just a very natural way of life in that sense. Yeah. And that's what I think we carry it forward.

Is is that advice you think that other than other entrepreneurs should, should heed and pay attention to is it's it's not about you know, creating In these major initiatives that are gonna, you know, transform your culture, because you're going to, all of a sudden overnight be this diversity, equity and inclusion focused organization, it's more about taking, taking this taking the little steps that are, that are more about, like just kind of doing the right thing and focusing on your core values and, and, and, and ingraining, who you want to be in the purpose that you want to bring to the world versus, you know, like, you're in charge of this initiative, which is Dei, you know, is that something that you think more entrepreneurs should should mean?

Again, I can, I can share my perspective, we're not really be an advice, because you know, we are in our own journey. The, the way I think about this, Jim is, you know, a lot of the, I think when an organization become big, when an organization becomes bigger, you need those focus initiatives, because you know, you need, you need that against specialization, to ensure that that's carried forward, and you're growing, and you're taking care of this consistently, and you're cohesive, and every team and so I think when you're still young and small, you will not have the capacity or sometimes even the necessity, because it's largely close knit, and you're able to kind of influence it directly. Neither need, therefore, at this stage, and my comment is only at the stage that we are in because once you grow larger, you do need, there's, there's lot more that you can do, and I have a cousin of mine is working in, in in a very large organization where she is interning with them on driving diversity and inclusion on recruitment process, for example, right. So there are many such specialized areas that you start thinking about, how do I go to, let's say, underrepresented community to make sure that they are given equal opportunities, or, and so on, and so forth. So there are many such specialized things that you can do. But at the stage that we are in, I think the one thing, if you have a good intent to make a positive impact on the world, the one thing that will aid that is making your company successful, right? Because and that is the only thing that will make it sustainable, and, you know, increase the area of impact. If you're doing good, you can do more good if you're successful. And if you exist, if you don't exist, everything is just fiction after that, right. And, and so in that context of the primary driver has to be what's right for the ark. And that is where the concept of I think the Dharma comes in, which is that all of us eventually are there to make the Ark successful. Because when the Ark is successful, everybody else is successful, the customers are successful, teams are successful, all the good initiatives that we do around equity or contribution to local communities, all of that becomes, you know, more sustainable. And the principle of, you know, respect is very intrinsic to how you run. The I once heard this very interesting, you know, phrase about tolerance versus respect, right. And a lot of the times, our response to these initiatives, or what we see in the society as well is because there was fundamental intolerance. And now therefore, there are special initiatives to drive tolerance and respect. Whereas if your fundamental is not of intolerance, you're not correcting some wrong. You're just you're building it as a way of life, then you intrinsically have a, you have respect, you have mutual respect. So there was no question of tolerance, which has to overcome intolerance. It's already there, as mutual respect everybody for themselves. Everybody is unique. You respect the uniqueness, but you're not concerned about the uniqueness? You're singularly only concerned about the success of the orc? Yeah, that's, I mean, I know sorry, for the very fuzzy answer. But that's, that's, that's what I think. I don't

think that was I don't think that was fuzzy, fuzzy at all, I only hope that you can realize that this is and people can realize that this is advice it may be unique to your own world. But this your unique environment is is not that unique for the stage of growth you're at. And I think people listening who are at similar stages of growth, should heed that same advice like this is a this is a way of being a way of a way of being human is, is focused on what your organization needs, who can bring those skills and that aptitude and that attitude to the organization. And certainly focus on on being human and your core values, and these other things will just come naturally out of it. I think I'm a firm believer in that. And so, hearing you talk about that is, is is special. So I want to I want to hop in to one last quick subject before we bounce into our, our founder five and that subject is really kind of the future of your space and the trends that are that are happening. And the main question that I have is is really is really kind of simple. I mean, might be somewhat complex, but I think it's pretty simple. Is it as this as this world evolves as The martech landscape evolves into what's clearly much more of a single pane of glass of a customer view. And how do you see first time impacting the, the path that this unified view of the customer is heading towards, let's just say, you know, take the, whatever time cadence you want, two years, five years, 10 years, whatever you want to take,

see, it's a, it's a firm belief that enterprises are on their path to becoming autonomous. What that what I mean by that is that there is going to be a certain baseline that the machine will deliver, and the humans will operate on top of it. A necessary condition for that is a lot of what we do today, which is you connect into all of the data, bring all the data together, identify consumers, enrich that data, make sure it's available in real time, you can then use it for personalization, marketing, ads, and analytics. But when I gaze ahead, and I say, Okay, where is all of this headed, and that is that is, that is a thought that we started first with as well. We see that in a few years from now. And we are already seeing the early shoots of it right with generative AI. And all of these tools that are coming into autonomously generate creatives are copies and right speeches and all emails and all of that stuff. That was really where the machine can take what provided you can give the machine context. So it can predict, we are today delivering on first day, that unified context for the consumer with all of that unified identity. The next piece that we are going to see in the near future is where the machine now starts coming, moving from being reactive to being a proactive controller of this experience, which is where the autonomous capabilities will come in. And at that point, I think we will be there making sure that we are building all of that readiness for the enterprise the day it wants to switch over and we are already doing some interesting interventions in that space to to start unlocking small features, small steps for the enterprise to move in that direction. But are we headed that way? Absolutely. No question about it. The scale of data, the expectations of consumers, the complexity of interfaces, are all pointing to the fact that this will require the machine to optimize. And it's not sustainable for humans to continue to take those gut calls, which leads to low ROI.

Awesome. Yeah. So all right. So that's, that's a great place to stop. Let's hop into the founder five. So my first question for you here is, what is the top KPI or metric that you are relentlessly focused on?

For us, the number one metric, I mean, apart from revenue and number of customer logos, I would say the number one KPI that we track is events growth, which is essentially the amount of data that we process, that metric becomes the best surrogate for us on growth, as well as adoption of the platform. And when we look at ourselves as a brain in the body, the more we are used and consumed, the more value we can create for the enterprise. So that is the number one metric for us events process.

Excellent. Second one is a top tip for growth stage founders, like yourself.

I think this is a this is a tip that I'm giving myself as well as I tell you, which is the you know, customer customer experience delivering high quality experience to existing customers is as important as acquiring new customers. And, and because that builds reputation, especially in our space, which we are in enterprise. So in enterprise reputation precedes everything else. And so that's, that's an extremely important piece. Some it might, it might sound like a cost for you, versus acquisition, the same dollars put an acquisition will give you a few more logos. But delivering great existing customer experiences is critical for long term success. And that's one of the big areas of investment for us.

It's a lot, it's a lot easier to keep a customer than to get a new one, that's for sure. All right, favorite book or podcast that's helped you to grow as a founder.

I have a few podcasts but the one that I really follow in general, the last other Sastre podcast, I really love the sasta podcast. Jason and all videos that I see on Sastre in general, I find I take a lot of notes from it. I find Jason incredible. You know, it's very down to earth very real. You know, the advice that he gives us all very real. So that's something that I derive a lot of value from.

Yeah, that's a good one. Shout out. All right. Piece of advice that counters traditional wisdom. Some

traditional wisdom says fail fast, right? But I don't like the fail fast approach. Fail fast is is okay? If those experiments are very small, right, you know, but what you want, what I, what I'd rather do is do things right the first time. And rather than fail fast, so not to say that velocity of experimentation is not important. But in in the space that we are in, which is focused on enterprises, we are an enterprise grade platform. There is no question of failure for us, we got to get it right. We deal with a very high value asset of the enterprises and we deal with high impact area of enterprises. And so fail fast is not something that is acceptable to us. We don't want to fail. So we want to get it right the first time every time.

Yeah. All right, last one here, what is going to be the title of your autobiography?

Okay. My favorite code growing up was, you know, the difference between being successful and not being successful is being exactly right. And almost right. So I probably borrow from that phase and say, if I read my autobiography, and I have hit what I wanted to hit in life, I would probably say from almost right to exactly right.

But it's a great, great, great way to end today. Thank you so much for giving back to our audience. I always like to allow for a little bit of self promotion at the end here. So how can those listening help you out?

Yeah, I mean, you know, look us up on LinkedIn. And you know, you can follow us on Twitter, there's a lot of great content. And if there are companies that are listening founders that are listening or doing anything in the marketing AI space, and you want to collaborate with us, we go to enterprises, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or just email me at Aditya at first time.com happy to collaborate. And if any of you want to our customer companies that are looking for a great customer experience platform, reach out we'd love to support you want accelerate your journey of growth.

First time the the real CDP. And thank you for joining us. This has been incredible. We've loved having you and man, just have a great rest of your week and keep building. Thanks, Jim, you have a one to one spin on this. Take care. If you love today's episode of the dirt, make sure you rate it on your favorite platform. And if you really liked this, go ahead and leave us an honest review. Thanks again for tuning in to the dirt