Transcript: Lior Gerson | TargetBoard | How to Turn Data into Power

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi friends, it's Eyal. You've reached Product Builder, where you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey began in 2012, when I learned what product is at my own startup. Since then I've worked in the industry, and since 2017 my company has been advising a wide range of companies. My drive is to help all of us get better as product people. And before we start, if you enjoy listening to Product Builder, please rate us five stars on Spotify. It gives me great feedback that the podcast brings you value, and it would make me very happy, so let's get started. Hi Lior, how's it going? All good, how are you? I'm doing great, and I'm really happy you came. With us is Lior, who is CEO and co-founder at TargetBoard AI. Lior, give us a few sentences of background so we can get to know you.

Who is Lior Gerson: from Vroom.com to Gettacar and TargetBoard

Lior Gerson: [00:52] So, today I'm the CEO of TargetBoard AI. Before that I held several engineering leadership roles: VP R&D, CTO, also CPO, and a few times interim CMO. I was a GM three times. One time was at Vroom.com, where I was a founder and CTO; the company IPO'd at two and a half billion dollars.

Eyal David: [01:12] You also moved between industries, and within an industry you went back to several products. Do you want to expand on that a bit?

Lior Gerson: [01:19] Yes, I had the privilege of doing the same business twice: basically an online car dealership. It's a very, very complex business with a lot of operations. You need to know what to buy, when to buy, how to buy, how to bring in customers, and every million dollars sitting in your inventory has a depreciating value. Very, very heavy operations. Once was at Vroom.com, a company that was extremely successful and IPO'd at two and a half billion dollars, as I said, and the second time at Gettacar, a company that was also very successful. We reached almost 200 million dollars in sales within two years, and in the end we shut down after COVID; there were all kinds of things there related to the American economy. Okay, so you'll expand on that later, it sounds very interesting.

Eyal David: [02:01] Tell me, I actually want to start here with a question I usually save for later. In your eyes, what are the most important product skills in a product person?

A product person's most important skill: knowing the customer

Lior Gerson: [02:09] I think the most important thing is to know the customer and the domain really, really well. Now, if you don't come with that from home, you need to learn it as fast as possible: talk to customers, and don't lean on all kinds of internal axioms and preconceptions. You have to know the customer, know their problems, not the problems the CPO comes and says are the ones to focus on. You really, really need to know the customer, and it will give you unbelievable power in the organization. Both as a product person and in general, as an internal player who needs to move the system in the direction they believe is right.

Eyal David: [02:43] If three months from now you need to refer someone to this recording, to this podcast, and you want to point to how to really know the customer best,

Lior Gerson: [02:53] what would that tip be that you could share with us? The best thing is to talk to customers. As much as possible on your own, without sales. As far as I'm concerned, do the sourcing of customers yourself, find prospects, do the work an SDR does for yourself, find them and talk to them. Not existing customers, customers who don't exist yet. Understand the market, understand what you're trying to build and who you're trying to sell to. That's funny, because at our company, at mine,

Eyal David: [03:19] that's what we do at the end of the day, because we're an external party and we want to get to know the industry, the product, the competitors and so on very quickly, so we really do things like that. Is it something you'd recommend as an employee, did you do it as an employee? I never did it, but if I were an employee today,

Lior Gerson: [03:33] and certainly if I were hiring a PM today: first thing, don't ask me what I want you to do, don't ask me what the roadmap is, don't ask me which features customers asked for most. Go and get to know the customer without filters. Maybe even use competing products, right? These are basic things people don't necessarily do. Yes, yes, using a competing product has more barriers. It's not necessarily free, you may need approvals, and it takes time until you get to know it and figure out whether it's any good. But go talk to the customer, really get to know them, ask them what actually hurts, why they chose your product, why they didn't choose your product. It will give you a huge amount of power. I believe it. I really connect with that.

Eyal David: [04:18] What about challenging in general, challenging conceptions? I think it's very, very important. Because a bit of what you said is basically, hey, let's now start doing SDR work and start asking questions,

Challenging the CEO: the MySupermarket story

Lior Gerson: [04:31] it felt to me like you believe in challenging. I think it's very, very important. I've seen so many companies fail because they just went with the flow: went with the roadmap, went with the CPO or the CTO, or whoever set the tone of where to go, because nobody challenged them. And nobody asked why we're really doing this, and maybe we'd be better off doing something else, and that's hard. It's always hard when you come in as a PM, and you're new, and to some extent you also want to please, and you also want... after all, someone is measuring your success, so you want to be in their good graces. It's always hard, but in the end that's what brings the power. I can tell you on a personal level too, the moments that advanced my career the most were the ones where I went to the CEO and challenged him. I think very good CEOs appreciate it, that there's someone who really thinks outside the box, who cares about the business, who didn't come just to work, he came to succeed, he came so they would succeed, and regardless of whether he currently shares their exact vision or not, he wants them to succeed. And for a CEO, that's someone to promote. Yes, who wouldn't want that. So give an example of a case like that, if you can. I can tell you that at MySupermarket, I started at MySupermarket right after the army. Maybe just say in a word what MySupermarket was? Sure. MySupermarket was a company that did supermarket price comparison. It was very, very successful and operated mainly in the UK. In the UK we had close to 20 million monthly active users. We had an app that was number one on both the App Store and the Play Store; I have screenshots of it ahead of Tinder and ahead of eBay. The company worked with and sold to the biggest companies in the world, customers like Walmart and Tesco and P&G and Unilever and Coca-Cola, all the brands. At some point Alon Bloch came in as CEO. The one before him was Amir Ofer; Amir Ofer is the one who killed the first terrorist in Operation Entebbe. So he was a war hero and he kind of built his whole career around that. And he was replaced by Alon Bloch, who had been co-CEO of Wix before that and came to lead MySupermarket. He came with a very structured agenda of how you grow, how you do growth, how you do PPC properly. And at the time the company had three revenue streams. It made money from ads, selling ads worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars cumulatively, to the brands I mentioned. It sold BI: they basically built a retail BI SaaS system, and again, this was 20 years ago. It was very, very successful. It was revolutionary, it was like early-days Salesforce. And a shopper panel, where the intention was basically to turn it into affiliates, so that they sell the traffic to the supermarkets. And the company invested almost all of its resources in that third stream, even though it barely made any money. Unlike the first two streams, which made a lot of money. And it more or less killed them off in order to invest in the third stream, even though there were no signals that it was really going anywhere. So what did you do? So we, in this case I was VP product, it was my first product role. And although I knew how to come up with lots of ideas, lots of things we could do to advance the agenda in the direction the CEO was pushing, it didn't work.

Eyal David: [08:13] It didn't work. At some point. How long, sorry, were you invested in that? You say at some point, how long did you dance that dance?

Lior Gerson: [08:21] About a year. A year. Altogether I was there seven years; I started as a developer and finished as VP product. During that period, out of the three streams, we built up the ads, we built up the BI, we built up lots of things. But in the last year, even two years, there was a very, very strong emphasis on this affiliation thing, and it didn't work. And in the end Alon, the CEO, went off to found Vroom, and I went with him.

Eyal David: [08:48] So okay, can you expand for a moment, I'm already curious, can you expand on why that model didn't work? It didn't work because that business model,

Lior Gerson: [08:59] was wrong from the start. I mean, we competed for traffic with the supermarkets, on the same keywords, for the same shoppers, and in the end we split it with them. In other words, there was no real ownership of the customer, and in terms of customer value, in the end the supermarkets learned all the tricks we did. Today when I shop on Shufersal online, all the savings offers and alternative baskets, those are all things MySupermarket invented 20 years ago. In the end, on features,

Eyal David: [09:32] it's very, very hard to differentiate over time. Interesting, so basically you went on with him to Vroom. Yes. Was there another example like that in your career where you came and banged on the table? I didn't quite understand where you banged on the table here, you basically just moved on.

Lior Gerson: [09:45] Yes, yes, there I didn't know how to bang on the table. It's also a muscle. Knowing how is also a muscle, yes. I think I tried to bang on the table many times as a VP. I think it was very, very hard. Even as a VP, even at good companies, to bang on the table in front of a CEO who has a certain agenda, who has committed to the board and committed to the investors that this is what he's going to do, this is the plan, and this is how we'll succeed. He comes to the team after that. He comes to the team when his opinion is already formed and that's the plan, and influencing after that was very, very hard for me. I also worked with CEOs who in the end were very opinionated. I mean, they really liked that I came with ideas, with arguments, with data.

Eyal David: [10:32] It wasn't... It wasn't enough. I'm curious, what does it look like at your company today, now that you're the CEO?

Lior Gerson: [10:40] We have a very, very open culture. Tell us a bit, expand. Yes: the whole team works very close to customers, very close to the data, very close to the market. We're very, very open. A weekly meeting where we talk about every customer, talk about sales opportunities, talk about what bothers people, what they need, what's happening in the market. Today, for example, we decided we're launching an MCP server next week. Anyone can come, and usually if they come with a good reason we'll change the roadmap overnight

Eyal David: [11:09] and make sure what needs to happen happens. I wish you that it continues as you grow, and I wish you that you grow. So basically you talked about obsessiveness in product. It's something you took with you, and you talked about how a PM needs to be obsessive about the thing, about the market. So now let's say you entered a new industry, you entered Vroom. What does onboarding like that look like?

Vroom: learning a new industry and investing in the wrong tools

Lior Gerson: [11:36] At Vroom, first of all, the company was founded with a lot of money; the founders came with 11 million dollars of friends and family, so we had a lot of money to burn, and we had to burn it fast. So very quickly they built a team, an amazing, amazing team; everyone who was on that team went on to become a VP or C-level at a very successful company. And we started learning the industry. I think in Israel in general, I'm talking about 2014, and for me personally too, we didn't know the car industry in the United States, certainly not its inner workings and the whole legal side and the operations and processes, which in my opinion is very different from what happens in Israel, and we didn't know what happens in Israel either; we didn't come from that field. And wearing the hat of the person who ran product in Vroom's first years, we basically fed off people in the field, people who had operated the car dealership before we decided to turn it into an online one, and we heard from them what bothered them, what they needed, where the opportunity was, and from that we derived a roadmap, a roadmap that was kind of fixed three years ahead. How do you turn this into a big, profitable online business? Now, what bothered these people? They didn't come from online, they didn't come from e-commerce; we came with a lot of e-commerce experience. What bothered them were operational things: how do I manage the inventory, how do I manage the garage, how do I manage procurement. And we invested a lot in rebuilding internal tools. We also invested in building the customer experience, but we invested a lot in building internal tools that, on the face of it, beyond a nominal operational improvement in the business, didn't build the business. They built their own business, they didn't break through. No, it's what people thought was needed and what would help the business run more smoothly, but in terms of user acquisition and lowering CAC and improving conversion and how, how, how do I turn this into a scalable business, that wasn't it. I mean, a lot of resources were invested in the wrong shot. Did Vroom, in the end, IPO at a very nice valuation?

Eyal David: [13:47] Could it have gone much further with different decisions at that time? I think so.

Gettacar: Vroom 2.0 with a tenth of the money

Lior Gerson: [13:56] Afterwards we built Gettacar. Gettacar was built. Who's we? Me and part of the team that built Vroom; I basically brought them back in because they had a lot of domain expertise and we knew we worked great together. So Asaf Abadi and Nurit Basson and all kinds of friends like that. Vroom was a very, very big success, and we wanted to do it a second time, better. We felt we deserved a corrective experience and that we could do something even bigger and better. And we joined Yossi Levi, who is based in Philadelphia, whose family had a dealership, and we decided we were doing Vroom 2.0. And we brought all the lessons, all the learnings and all the domain expertise we'd acquired in the first round. And we brought a better system, faster, cheaper, and we focused on the experience. In terms of all the product metrics, conversion and CAC and retention and satisfaction and whatever else you'd want to measure about the product we built, it was incomparably better. Because we knew. Again, even though there were relatively far fewer resources, the company raised significantly less money, say 50 million versus 500 million, in the end the result for the customer was better. So much so that when the CTO who replaced me at Vroom left, I invited him to see what we'd built at Gettacar. And he was stunned, like, there's no way you managed to do what you wanted. Here, I'll give you an example. There's a trade-in process for cars. A customer would enter the car's details and get an offer. At Vroom the system generated an offer, but a person had to approve it. So we kept a team of 50 people whose whole job was to click the button and approve it. At Gettacar we said, but we know they're just clicking a button, and we already know the domain; you can't bluff us in operations that it's not good enough and there are all kinds of nuances. We're doing it automatically, and it works automatically. So we saved 50 people. Amazing. And that's just a product understanding of the domain. It's a process understanding of the domain. Right.

Eyal David: [16:08] And you also understood how the industry breaks down, where there's fat, where you can skip. Yes. How many years were you at Vroom?

Lior Gerson: [16:15] Two and a half years. Wow, and that's significant learning you did in two and a half years. It was two and a half very, very intense years; my wife said I didn't, I didn't sleep for two and a half years. And what did it look like at Gettacar afterwards? Gettacar was amazing. It's also going in with confidence. You know what you're doing, you understand the market, you understand the customers. It's night and day in terms of building with confidence that you know it and understand it,

Eyal David: [16:39] versus learning it along the way. I want to dwell a little longer on the last example. There was the basic thing you mentioned, that you cleaned out things that aren't the core of the product and don't contribute to the business; that was easy. I don't know if easy, it was easy to understand. What else did you feel you cracked there, where at Vroom, you know,

Build versus buy: cutting costs by 95%

Lior Gerson: [17:00] you walked blindly and followed the roadmap, let's say? There's the topic of how you build a product. Of build versus buy, which I see all the time; today it's partly a derivative of AI too. But let me give an example. When we built Vroom, it was relatively early days of cloud; we built on Azure, we kept a DevOps team, we spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on cloud cost, and we thought we were building at the leading edge. Four years later we built Gettacar with no DevOps, on Heroku, everything faster, everything cheaper; we basically saved 95% of the cost just through build-versus-buy decisions and how you build things. And again, we also didn't build internal tools; we used everything off the shelf, instant tools, we didn't invest an hour of work in it.

Eyal David: [17:56] I think that's where the world is going today too, at the end of the day. Right, right, for better and for worse. So now tell us what you're doing, tell us about your current company.

Why TargetBoard was founded: organizations without real data

Lior Gerson: [18:05] So, TargetBoard basically comes to bring together the learnings from everything I learned in my career. I mean, in e-commerce companies we knew very well what was happening in the organization: where customers come from and how much they cost and how every feature improves conversion, and there really was an excellent picture of what's happening in the business. Now, that picture, sometimes the business cared about it, or rather, the CEO would come and show the plan, caring about what the real data said, and sometimes he'd show a plan that had nothing to do with the real data. I mean, you have no chance in the world, no matter what you draw for the board, to cut CAC in half within a week. Or we'd think we'd ship some magic feature and suddenly have ten times the sales next quarter. But after I got to B2B companies, I realized they have no idea what's going on, and they have no KPIs. I went in and convinced some CEO to set up internal BI, so that I as VP product would know what's happening, and suddenly you see that all the metrics reported to management are 90% wrong. You don't have 100 thousand visitors on the site, you have 10. And you don't know what to do with it, because these are organizations that grew very fast and don't have the resources to invest in really understanding what's happening to them. They have tons and tons of waste, and waste always bugs me, in everything in life and certainly at work. I really want you to continue, but can you expand on that a bit for a moment? A lot of organizations, certainly organizations that are unicorns, that grew very fast and didn't have time to invest in infrastructure, they grow fast and don't really have orderly organizational processes. You know, they hire lots of people; now go ask any manager. He knows he has better people and less good people. Ask him by how much they're better. Nobody can tell you. Ask him where his bottlenecks really are, and how much his bottlenecks really affect his KPIs? Nobody can tell you. Most managers aren't really data-driven, and their ability to get to data is limited. It's limited by the organization's ability to give them the tools, and it's limited by their ability to find the time to get to the data they need. And that's why these organizations run with tons of waste. I was, I worked as VP product at a very successful Israeli unicorn. And after I came from that world of startups and so on, at Gettacar our lead VC came and told me, "Lior, it's the best run company I've ever seen." Again, there are no formulas to sell, not true, but I came to the SaaS world. There are bigger companies, companies of say 700 people. And then I said, things aren't moving; everything that should take a day takes a week, half a year, three months. And I went to the CEO and told him, listen, things aren't moving. I mean, everything takes ten times longer than it should. And I know why, I can fix it. I can very easily come in and fix it. And he told me, Lior, I know, but I didn't bring you in to fix my company. I told him, fine, I understand, that's what you brought me in to do. And then we basically decided to found TargetBoard. TargetBoard basically comes to solve this problem for managers. We know how to connect to all their systems, whether it's Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot. Where are you really modeled? I mean, besides those usual suspects, what are you? All the company's systems, we know how to connect them together automatically, within minutes, automatically build their data warehouse, clean the data, organize it. Automatically build for every manager the dashboards they need, the metrics they need, and they have tools on top of it for analyses and insights and alerts and automations. Everything they'd die for a dedicated, excellent BI team to build them over years, they can get from us in an hour. Which is always exactly the point, right? But

Eyal David: [22:00] take me through it for a second. So if I'm just, say, a VP product, which metrics am I looking at?

Lior Gerson: [22:07] Today, when you're a VP product, you need to connect, depending on the domain. For example, you connect events from the product and maybe events from Salesforce, and you connect them to Mixpanel and you connect them to Tableau. Every cycle there requires you to explain what you want to do. Right? You have to explain to it that this is a page view and this is an event of such-and-such type, and now I want to measure conversion from A to B. Now, you're no different from anyone else; every VP product in the world uses the same tools and asks the same questions, sets the same definitions in order to build the same reports. And here I have a "lead generated" event; it doesn't matter in the end. All those event systems are Segment.io or Mixpanel or Heap or all those systems. Right? You also need engineering to come and instrument all those events for you, right? That's also a process. It's all projects. And in the end you come and you have a dashboard; what more can that dashboard give you? What you asked? You asked, you built, it's like a side product, that's what it has to give you. You come to TargetBoard, and we take the data for you on our own. We bring you everything automatically. All the conversion events and all the events you want to learn. Now you're page views or sessions or users.

Eyal David: [23:25] Okay, anything that's product, and you can probably customize it very well down to the level of specific products. And if I'm VP R&D? Then across all your products. Ah, so it's not more going in the direction of, I'm just saying, how long open,

Lior Gerson: [23:40] how long bugs stay open or how many... You can take it wherever you need. We come to help the manager, to multiply their power. That's it, tell us about that. To help them understand what's happening in their organization at every stage. And according to their problems, each one at a different stage of the company is interested in different things. At early stage you're interested in seeing that you've reached market fit, and at late stage you want to see that you're optimizing the operation and reaching scale. And it could be that something is starting for you now, where you say, wait, everyone is waking up on vacation, or people are waking up in meetings, or I have initiatives that are stuck. Every day of the year different things will interest you, and your ability to get to them

Eyal David: [24:20] is annoying. Exactly. So basically it works with prompts, and I ask questions and a dashboard gets built for me, what does it look like?

Lior Gerson: [24:26] As of today it's a dashboard builder; we're about to launch building through prompts, but it's a UI that's very DIY and very simple. You can build a dashboard in three seconds. And what feedback are you getting? Good feedback. Maybe you want just a little? We're a bootstrapped company. Today we're installed at dozens of customers, both in Israel and abroad. Companies of 300 to a thousand people. We have managers who use us to optimize KPIs in engineering, product, support, sales, marketing, HR, finance, whatever they need.

Eyal David: [25:02] Because you're basically delivering real ROI, that's why I'm asking what the feedback is, because it takes me back to what you said about that CEO who went ahead with the wrong data, and then it's probably a matter of ego, I don't know what prevented him from accepting the truth. What does it look like with you? Because suddenly anyone can come and bang on the table like you said, and here's the data. So it varies from customer to customer. Take an example of some customer.

What managers discover in week one, and the future of BI

Lior Gerson: [25:28] A VP R&D connects on day one. Now, someone who managed all the work, his first day with us. In his first week in the organization he sees that everything the team is working on isn't what the VP product told him in onboarding is important to work on right now. So he aligns within a second; not learning now where all kinds of things are in Jira and who's working on what, within a second he sees everything. In the same way, the one who discovers, he was sure, again, a CTO, he was sure that everything goes through code review and they're SOC compliant and everything is in order and... nothing. Nothing at all goes through code review; there are things that are stuck, you know, with months of work that never reached production. All the PMO forces who suddenly start to realize that everything is on track, on track, all the initiatives are on track, I love "on track" the most. Like, everything is on track until the last day; it's not on track, it's actually only at 30%, we'll say so next week. Endless examples. It's really fun, it's really fun, every, every day there's something different. With another customer who comes and finds something else that interests them and helps them. What does that say, in your opinion, about the role of BI in companies like these? I think it will disappear. I think to a large extent that I don't want... It's not a surprise, but yes. But I think that if, say, we think about AI that builds products for BI, or most BI people and most analysts, up to those who do real research or real market research, which we can also talk about, they do the same thing. We came at it from the fact that in the end, what was there? There were horizontal systems like Tableau, like Power BI: come build whatever you want, and still everyone builds the same thing. Maybe make me a filter like this, slice it by dates for me, build me a graph of how many users I had in the system today; everyone does the same thing. And then some vertical systems. Make me the system that does sales analysis, product analysis, which in the end is all the same thing. Except it's limited, because you're basically limited by the number of connectors to systems you can connect. You're limited in your customization, because it's all "come and do a project." If it doesn't work the way I work, then it doesn't work. So you have lots of companies that are older, more legacy, with unclean data, that can't use them. But they're all the same system with a different skin. I mean, take ten systems today that solve product analytics; their differentiation is nothing. Right, they copy features from each other; in the end it's a different skin on the same system that works the same way, same architecture, same data. That's also what's really scary now with the whole AI thing, right? I mean, it's actually funny: almost every person you talk to is excited about how they migrated from Jira to Asana, and it's the same example with everyone, how they moved all their data from Jira to Asana in an hour. And you say, when you're a SaaS company and in the end you're data that's I/O with some basic analysis, what's your moat? What's the differentiation? Why, if say I work on Mixpanel today, on Heap or on something else, what sets me apart? In a second I switch from one to the other, and the world needs to change; it needs to be much more focused on what's essential, and I think that's really changing the industry. And what did you want to say about market research? It does market research well; it probably does it better than a person does. So take me through it, who are your competitors today? Today we mainly compete with internal teams. We fit in the cracks, because in the end internal teams have limited capacity, and they have a queue and a backlog and a lot going on, and mainly the cost: they have a very large cost and a long response time, and there are a lot of managers who need information today, certainly when there's AI pressure and you need to prove productivity and prove efficiency and justify every cost

Eyal David: [29:27] and they don't have the tools to bring in that data; those are the ones we help most. Tell me, when you built this product, what was the most significant challenge you ran into along the way? Say I'm a manager hearing about this, it sounds amazing to me, I'd bring it into the organization, but what did it look like at the start? Did you manage to get customers easily, what did it look like with design partners, what did it look like at the beginning? We managed to bring in design partners easily because we're very connected in the industry.

A saturated market, design partners and why salaried C-levels

Lior Gerson: [29:52] I think that as a small startup competing in a very saturated market, it's saturated with a lot of companies that never really managed to take off. And a lot of experienced managers who tried a lot of solutions and got burned: we tried and it won't fit us, and we tried and left, and we tried and didn't use it. There's a lot of skepticism. A lot of skepticism in the industry, a lot of skepticism among customers about whether we can do what we say. The market was also educated, the market was educated toward very vertical products. Think about how people talked a year ago. Be as vertical as possible, as narrow as possible, solve the smallest problem you can. We'd hear, no, I don't invest in platforms, I invest in features, just bring me a feature. But I don't want to build a feature, I want to be a platform. A big company, a big company needs to be a platform. But gradually, as you bring more customers, you bring more success cases and you bring proof, and then it breaks open.

Eyal David: [30:56] I'll ask you another question. Tell me, what do you, what do you, what do you measure? What did you measure in the early stages, those design partners? What about your KPIs?

Lior Gerson: [31:03] In the early stages we actually focused on engineering departments, CTOs, VP R&Ds, from the understanding that they didn't have a good solution. They usually didn't get answers from internal BI teams, and many times they went barefoot; all they did was take a print screen from Jira,

Eyal David: [31:20] and even that barely. There's something else here as you move forward: they also have a big budget, right? Easy to take a bite here if you want,

Lior Gerson: [31:28] and like you said, there's a very big hunger there for this. Yes, they're people who love metrics, they love progress. And there's another nuance here that we also learned along the way: founders don't feel a need to justify themselves. From a founder's point of view, he's doing his job, he raised the money, his company is perfect. Don't come and tell him stories, you can't improve it. But when you come to a C-level who is an employee, and he now needs to prove and show his improvement, that's a completely different story. So a salaried C-level is much more open to you helping him help himself

Eyal David: [32:04] show his performance. Okay, so that's why you set that criterion of 300-plus employees, I understand. Okay, Lior, so where will the company go from here? How do you see it?

From software to every industry: how TargetBoard expands

Lior Gerson: [32:14] So look, we started with software. In software the bar is the highest. We said, we have a product that kills it in software, we'll take it to more places. What does "kills it in software" mean? It means I showed it to the person who was Head of Analytics at Monday a year ago, the one who built their BigBrain, who has since moved to NVIDIA, but he was in the process of building BigBrain's replacement, and I showed him what we do. Guys, I'm telling you, a prototype, a year in, not even customers yet. He told me, listen, this is crazy, this is the craziest thing I've seen, this takes our BigBrain and goes backwards. From there, this problem we're solving isn't a problem of the software world; every business in every vertical, every domain, every industry has it. Lennar, which is a construction company, has it; Albertsons, which is a big retailer, has it. Their managers have no ability to get to their data in a zoomed-in way. He says, I have 50 data and BI people, and every time I have a question it takes me half a year to get an answer. We want to solve this for every company in the world, and the platform we built is flexible enough that we can do it. And where do you think the challenges ahead are? The challenge is in execution, in scale, in how you do go-to-market right, how you prioritize right. Which industry are you targeting? First of all we want to conquer software along the way. There's something viral and contagious about it. I mean, we go in, say, we hit the CTO, he brings in the CPO, he brings in the CRO; basically the company infects itself. I mean, from Jira, it goes into Zendesk, into Salesforce, into HubSpot, until the whole management team sits on the organization. In the same way, at the level of industries, we go into fintech software. Fintech software leads you to fintech companies that aren't software, or healthcare. So we're just seeing this kind of evolution, where suddenly companies that aren't software, retailers and such, show up

Eyal David: [34:15] and get interested in it. So we'll see where it goes. Listen, what's also nice here along the way is that the deeper you go into an industry, suddenly you can also provide an industry standard and give more insights that you can only get when you're actually big in the industry. Yes. Very interesting. Do you want to say another word about AI and how you see it before we wrap up? I'm very worried about the fate of the middle class.

AI, the middle class and advice for product managers

Lior Gerson: [34:38] I think everything that enabled us to build the culture of high-tech, the education, the capabilities and the experience, is going to go through a very big change that will lower the bar very significantly. It's not a question of how easy it will be to build products, but a question of why pay people to build products at all, when I can pay my ten-year-old daughter to build me an equivalent product. Not today, but in ten years. And I think it will create a very, very different society without a middle class. There will always be an aristocracy. There will always be an aristocracy, people who really control the money; all the layers below will contract a lot, both contract and weaken. Certainly if you take it to a situation where the aristocracy or the government controls the media, and you, as today's middle class, have all kinds of tools to be critical or to distinguish the essential from the trivial, truth from lies. We think we have them; I'm not sure we do. I think all of that is going to drop very significantly. I think that's where, that's kind of where we're being taken. And like many things, I'm not sure it's good.

Eyal David: [35:50] So if we want to end on an optimistic note, what's the best advice you can give product managers who want to get into the field?

Lior Gerson: [35:58] Don't get in. No, it's not that they have an alternative. I think the advice is to go somewhere that really has moats, moats that are defensible. Where it will be harder to replace them in a year, or two years, or five years. Obviously, anything connected to the physical world, anything connected to people. I think "service as a software" isn't new; it's something that's already been running in the industry for a year, and I think it's moving forward.

Eyal David: [36:36] Wow. Tell me, and if people want to get in touch with you, how do they do it? LinkedIn. Cool. And are you hiring, are there open positions, what does that look like? Yes, yes, we're hiring, hiring for several big key roles right now, very quickly.

Lior Gerson: [36:51] We post each time, so the best thing is to follow and see what we posted that week and... Excellent. Lior, it was so great that you came, it was really interesting. Me too, thank you very much. Great, bye bye.

Eyal David: [37:00] Hi friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and follow us, of course, for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app. And of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd be happy if you wrote to us. We'd really appreciate five stars on every platform and for you to follow us so more listeners can discover us and find the podcast. You can also find previous episodes on every app or on the YouTube channel; we have links in the description. Until next time, come on, be effective, and bye bye.