Treat Every Customer Like Your Best Customer | Josh Schachter

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #280, we welcomed Josh Schachter, SVP @ Gainsight, Creator of [Un] Churned Podcast & Writing Book on how the world's most exceptional founders build businesses centered around human relationships. 

On July 21st, 2025 Gainsight announced it acquired Update.ai: Accelerating the Age of Atlas Agents. 

This also brought forward Josh Schachter, founder of UpdateAI and one of the first to build in post-sales AI, stepping in as SVP & GM of Atlas. 

Josh is a product thinker through and through – someone who’s lived the day-to-day pain of customer teams and built UpdateAI from that front-line perspective. 

In this episode, Josh and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #280 Highlight Reel:**

1. AI is here to amplify human effort, not replace it entirely
2. Defining & living your core business values
3. Learning from podcast interviews & conversations
4. Building a business into an acquisition target for larger companies
5. Learning from public companies & their NPS performance

Click here to learn more about Josh Schachter

Click here to learn more about Gainsight

Click here to learn more about UpdateAI

Click here to learn more about [UN] Churned Podcast

Huge thanks to Josh for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & contact center space into the future. 

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00.318)
All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady Cesana Super excited for today's guest, Josh Schachter from Gainsight. Josh, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (00:12.29)
to the CX nation my friend.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:13.918)
Josh, number one, had some awesome chats with you leading up to today. Pump for you to join, pump for you to share your story. Super cool background. And again, I know if you remember from our last chat, love kind of how...

your story is a little bit different than a lot of our guests where the seat that you're sitting in today is because a lot of your own hard work and your own effort and your own, you know, going out there and building an incredible company that became of extreme value to a business like Gainsight. So I'm pumped man that you agreed to join the show and excited to hear your story. Why don't you take a couple of minutes? I'm going to lay out the stepping stones question my friend spent a few minutes introducing yourself and giving a sense for how you got into this whole space.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (00:57.55)
So let's start with the headline. I didn't know what customer success was five years ago. We'll start with that as kind of my origin story. I'm a founder at heart. This is my, well, this, I say this as if it's still around. But I sold my startup, Update AI to Gainsight. It was my third startup that I've done. And I've spent my professional career first in product management, building startups built for other people as well as my own.

And then I worked at Boston Consulting Group, but worked in an incubation studio within that company. Learned a ton there. Learned a lot about building relationships, which is something that I'm really focused on these days, I will say. And spun out of that and had an opportunity to go work for, not work for, to partner up with this guy, Bill Gross, in Southern California. He's the founder and chairman of Idealab, which is the first ever incubator.

And it's one of those opportunities where it's like, wow, I can work with Bill. I don't care. Whatever he wants to work on, let's do it together. And we batted around some ideas. And we came up with this concept around just helping teams. This is five years ago. So helping teams be more efficient in their communication. Because I was coming from BCG, and there were so many emails and Slack messages and spreadsheets and PowerPoints and everything.

And it was just so much. And I was like, I just want a distilled way. I mean, it's kind like what we have today with AI, with the LLMs. But this was before that. And so then we said, look, we're going to do this through AI. We're going to build out. But we didn't have LLMs at the time. Or at least we didn't know about it. So we assembled a really strong data science team, built out Update AI, realized in that journey that this is during COVID, the biggest form of communication was virtual meetings.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:20.285)
Yep.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (02:41.176)
Customer success managers and teams are relentlessly on back-to-back calls with customers. It's incredibly important. And yet, they're kind of a little bit underappreciated and had some specific pain points around follow-up items and checking off action items from meetings and stuff. And that's when I learned about customer success. We're great. Let's do it. Let's solve this problem for this group. And then we'll see where it goes. And then we just kind of got deeper and deeper into CS. And I got to.

You know, I led with my own curiosity when I was talking to folks, because I literally, again, didn't really know anything about it. So I was very genuine in having these very naive questions and conversations. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it was genuine. People knew that. And now it would be embarrassing to ask those questions. Or of course, it would be contrived. But I'm still learning. I still consider myself that I don't know anything about CS. So here we are at Gainsight.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:20.302)
It's one of the best ways to enter a space, Josh, when you have no idea.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:38.047)
I love it. wait, a couple of quick questions. The experiences that you had with Boston Consulting Group, what were...

I guess some of the biggest immediate pain points that used to drive you crazy when you would see some of these clients and you'd be involved in some of these engagements, you said all these different mediums, all this different noise buzzing around, what were the couple big things that were always driving you crazy that you knew could be fixed very, very easily or streamlined or brought into a singular medium that would make internal comms a little bit easier across teams?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (04:12.686)
I don't know that we knew the solution when we started Update AI, but we knew that the problem statement was, and I think a lot of people have to deal with this, when you're running a team, and I was a general manager of our small startup incubated teams, and I had to manage the team, kind of keep all the trains running on time sort of thing, which takes, mean communication is everything when it comes to that. And you're communicating.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:37.363)
Absolutely. Yep.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (04:41.366)
say downward, right? But you're communicating to the team that's reporting in to you, making sure that, and then you're communicating laterally to your other peers and other functions. And then you're communicating upward to, in the case of BCG, it was the partners on the case, and it was the steering committee, the client site, and those sorts of things. And was just so much communication at these different levels. And it was just a lot of time, and it was challenging to keep everybody on the same page. And I said, that's what I want to solve, and I think AI can probably help with that.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (05:09.93)
It's funny hearing you say that it makes me kind of where my brain goes like you're right some of the best managers or some of the best Extended leadership teammates that I've ever worked with They're just awesome storytellers. They're awesome at telling a story up the ladder and giving an executive summary or an executive view of what What's going on in the day to day and then they're awesome at telling that same story down the ladder To all the other ranks to so people understand what the hell you got to focus on what's important. What's critical? What are we doing? Great? What are we doing?

What are the things that we got to know about that are coming down the line? storytelling, it is a huge, huge piece of it. And by the way...

COVID changed it again. would argue, so some of our friends that, you know, we're awesome leaders at walking the floor and they could, they could command a 300 person call center and by walking the floor and walking all the different pods, are those guys and gals as good as running 150 or 200 people this way, where you actually have to command an audience in a totally different way. It's, it's, we're in an interesting world. And then now, and I know we're going to talk about it a bunch, but you, you add AI to the mix where you got all these.

different thoughts and feelings and emotions flying around about whether it's good, bad or ugly. It's pretty interesting, man. But like communication at the end of the day on the CX side and on the EX side, it's everything. It's literally everything, right Josh?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (06:29.902)
It is everything. And we've also all experienced that one person who's maybe a little bit too good at telling stories. But I think we'd agree that storytelling is an incredibly important skill set.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:38.93)
Yes.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:43.047)
Some people I'm convinced they bought a book at some point and then they just rehearsed like page after like they're just had them already to go

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (06:50.222)
I've got the books, man. I've got them right behind me here. There's no shame in some of the books. There's some good ones. But sometimes authenticity, too, is important.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (07:01.022)
Totally agree with that. That's awesome suggestion. Thanks for sharing some of that. Love to kind of poke your brain in the first pillar of team. Why don't you, I'd love for you to kind of jump in and I know that we're going to talk about Gainsight, but you've worked with a bunch of different companies, man. You've seen a bunch of different companies cross-planet earth. Spent a couple of minutes kind of talking about some of the things that you've seen as it relates to the CS side or to the customer facing side that.

you've really kind of brought forward with you from every business or every role that you've ever been in around the team side. And then if you're able to, I'm happy for you to please share a little bit about the Gainsight team and some of the things that you guys are doing today.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (07:36.419)
Yeah, yeah. mean, like I said, I didn't know what customer success was. I spent my career building B2C and other products in more incubation types of environments. So I learned about customer success just through doing lots of research. I've got my own podcast, Gainsight now has. It's unchurned and wearing the hat and everything. I learned just through those interviews, just the things that you're doing now with me. I learned just through that firsthand primary research.

And then through my experience building my own startup, Update AI, when we were managing our customers. It's a mindset. Customers have to come first. I'm reading a book right now by Fred Reichheld. He's the creator of NPS. You know Fred?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (08:17.402)
Fred's been on the show. He was one of our early guests. Please go. Before we jump off Fred Reichheld I want to share my one Fred Reichheld story, but keep going. Keep going, Josh.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (08:22.748)
yeah?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (08:28.78)
Yeah, yeah, no. So I'm reading his Winning on Purpose book. it just talks about you have to love your customers. And the ones that do that, ultimately, their valuation greatly exceeds the ones that don't. And you can look at that through the multiples of their market cap for the public companies. Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (08:47.578)
Literally, yeah, there's literally the financial data is there to back it up. I He was incredible, you know He said something to me that'll never forget and if anybody ever brings up MPS or right called I I always share this I asked him I said so like Fred like did you get rich from MPS? This is off offline This is off like offline and he goes why was that Bain for many years? So, you know, I did pretty pretty well, but he goes either, know, I really got rich

I said, how? goes, once we knew that MPS worked, said, once we got to the point where we had several public companies.

that had adopted NPS and they were actually using it and they were measuring it and they were actually measuring and managing. He said, once I started to see which companies had extremely high NPS, he I already knew that the rest would take care of it. then I said, that is fascinating, man. like, and to this day, if you look, there is still charts and there's, can find different lists of companies that are, know, hell bent on NPS and their financial performance typically goes behind it,

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (09:44.911)
We talk about earned growth, which is.

You know, also about like referrals, creating referral loops for your best customers to share references and referrals with others. So that's something that I'm actually working on right now at Gainsight. We're in the early stages of it. I recently took over customer marketing. By the customer marketing, another term I didn't know about what it meant six months ago. That's six months ago, not six years ago. So I'm learning. very much learning by doing. I'm very much in this kind of sponge-like state right now in my life. But yeah, we're trying to build out just a really solid referral program.

got the foundations of a great advocacy program and some other things. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know where we want to go with this, but...

but just it has to be in the ethos of the company that the customer comes first. It's fun. It's fun to solve their problems. There's no better feeling than when you take a customer that was having some problems. And because you got close to them, that customer was elevated. Your relationship with them was elevated to a greater place than it was in the first place before they even had the issues.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:48.987)
100%. And then Josh, I say it all the time, but people want to go to work at a place where they have the authority or the they're empowered to actually do that. They're actually able to figure out what's going on, get to the bottom of something, make something right for a customer. People want to go work in a company like that. They don't want to be working at a company where the T's and the C's and the SOPs override everything that they could possibly do. When they're hearing a human explain a story or a problem or an issue with, with their product or their service.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:20.287)
So a couple thoughts. Number one.

terms of some of the tools, mean, most of our listeners are, are, are familiar with, you know, a company like gains. It's been obviously a game changer in our space. And there's so many companies out there that, that, use it. But I like to spend a couple of minutes on tools. and then I'll give you the option here. Like number one, we can talk about some of the tools that you guys are building and using and leveraging a gain site or for you and some of the background that you've had and building your own business. I'd love for you to spend like, maybe a few minutes talking about some of the tools that really have mattered in your journey. And some of the tools.

that you really kind of focused on that ended up having the biggest bang for their buck. Because I know right now a lot of people are confused. We have AI here, we've got SaaS utilization rates at a low spot, we have people thinking they can build all their own stuff. Maybe some of that's true, maybe it's not, but I want to hear from you. I'd for you to spend a couple of minutes just kind of talking about tools and some of the things that you've seen across your journey.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (12:16.75)
Listen, as Upd8.ai is the startup, we were pretty much maxed out at around 10 people, FTEs for the whole company. So we were a little small for proper CSP, let's put it that way. But we did our best. We stayed very close to our customers through Slack, opened up. And we still do that at Gainsight. So it scales to larger companies. But getting very entrenched.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (12:32.573)
Okay.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (12:41.338)
in Slack and building the relationship with our customers that way was really important. We manage ourselves through the typical suite of Google Drive and Notion. We were big Notion users at the time. And those sorts of tools. And of course, we used our own product, our own note taker. That was essential.

It's no longer, actually we've sunset that at Gainsight, so it's not a plug for it. But these tools like Gong and all the other note takers, they're critical to be able to share the voice of the customer, I believe. At Gainsight, obviously we Gong ourselves. So Gong is Gainsight on Gainsight. Gainsight on Gainsight. Yep, so we use Gong. And...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (13:05.022)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (13:17.503)
Gates it on gates

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (13:26.604)
Yeah, mean, it keeps us straight. It's very important. As you can imagine, it's kind of the lifeblood of what we do. And of course, we could be doing it better, like everybody could be drinking their own champagne better as well. Staircase is probably the hottest of our products internally that we use. So Staircase AI was acquired by Gainsight just under two years ago. And...

gives you the intelligence about each of your accounts through AI, through all the different inputs of.

Slack messages and email and the phone, the video recordings, a little bit of product telemetry as well, puts it all together and spits out effectively like a dossier about your account so you know exactly. And we're a big Slack culture at Gainsight, so we pipe that into Slack so that anybody can prompt and get the information about their customer. That's super big for us. What we're really most excited about.

is, or a couple things. So, Ejectic, we can talk about that in a moment. But more kind of on the here and now is our new MCP. So, and forget our MCP, which was released recently for a moment. We are all in on Claude as a company. Everybody's got their enterprise seats right now. We're just in the process of going through and properly vetting co-work so that we can roll co-work out to the organization as well. Everything that we do, we wanna make sure is like at the...

like the utmost compliant and secure levels. But we've gone all in. We have some citizen builders who are vibe coding some stuff in Cloud Code. And maybe even more importantly, they're creating skills for the rest of the organization to use. skills that help.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (15:07.224)
What type of skills, Josh, out of curiosity?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (15:10.754)
Yeah, so like skills to help you present, prepare presentations to your customer based on the information that it can pull about the account. With the MCP, we have the MCP for Staircase and for Gainsight CS product, you can pull in all that information into Claude. And then you're there, and then you're prompting. You've got your playground of prompting to build the presentation to share with your customer right then and there. And of course, even the more tactical, practical stuff like helping draft emails and those sorts of

So it's been a game changer. Then you've got the skills that are a little bit more horizontal, where it's help me give me the talking points and objection handling based on the company and help me make sure that I'm always talking like a true human and get rid of those darn dashes and that sort of thing. I'm trying to think of other types of skills. There's all kinds of ones that some of our team have created. But it's become very popular. We've, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:03.999)
How long have you guys been at this? Because number one is super duper impressive. Number two, it sounds extremely organized. And then number three, you see the same thing that we see every day here. Not all companies are that far ahead. Not all companies are that ready to go and assembled around what you just sort of laid out. How long have you guys actually been on this path at Gainsight?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (16:32.846)
I don't know that we're so far ahead. think we're definitely on the right side of the bell curve. We're probably in that top 25 distribution. I don't know that we're top 10, right? But we're up there. We won a distinction within the Vista portfolio of all their companies for.

being kind of the best AI enabled and that sort of thing. So it's definitely first and foremost on our minds. Chuck Ganapathy, he's our new CEO, newish CEO. He's been in that role for about eight, nine months. And he's really been leaning into it, as Nick did as well, Nick Mitha. But it comes in the top, right? They're sharing out the podcasts they're listening to and all the news. And Chuck is vibing, vibe coding little POCs and stuff, prototypes on the weekend and stuff like that.

Where was I going there? think we're also at a place where many companies that I speak to are at where you've got the citizen builders that are all engaged. And by the way, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna cut myself off here, Adrian. I think, no, but I hope you don't cut this. I think I just saw you pick up.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:39.007)
No, please keep going. Josh is awesome.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (17:45.614)
like a 24 or 30 ounce of Mountain Dew. Did I get that right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:48.895)
No, okay, I promise you wasn't Mountain Dew. It's primarily ice water with just a little splash of Mio. I promise you not Mountain Dew. That'd be like a movie cup of Mountain Dew right there. No, I promise it wasn't. after the show I'll show you so you know it's not Mountain Dew.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (17:57.002)
OK. OK. OK. OK.

Yeah, I thought that was like one of those like like big gulps like giant big gulps of Mountain Dew. thought we were like back in the 90s again.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (18:15.286)
OK, all right, yeah, you've got to prove it to all of us there. Anyway, we're starting to formalize things a little bit more, like other companies are too. making sure that for, because we're building some internal tools ourselves as well, right, with Cloud Code and those sorts of tooling. And we're encouraging citizen builders and.

all the different functions in the company to be building and buying stuff. Like in customer marketing, a woman that works for me recently vibe coded a, to call it a platform would be probably extreme, but an application for people in the company to submit their voting for our upcoming Game Changer Awards at Pulse. And.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:06.912)
That's pretty sweet.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (19:07.022)
And it was super cool. It was super cool. mean, like the experience of basically creating like this very visually appealing interface with all the data, and it gives you a walkthrough and this and that as a way to capture all of our senior leadership votes was so cool. And so we're encouraging people just to play around that like that. And at the same time, we're centralizing as well the larger initiatives to make sure that there's not redundancy in efforts, right? Everybody's working on their piece of it.

And that, you know, IT is very closely kept in the loop so that there is the security, but also that they can release any hurdles and knock down the hurdles when they're needed, because data availability is something that often trips people up. So it's been fun. And the one that I've been most excited about has been part of this gentrification of CS program. And what we've done is we've built an application

to run instance optimization reviews, basically. So in a platform like Gainsight, people, many of our customers have had us for years, and it's a large platform with lots of things that you can do. And there's no shame in saying that sometimes you have to perform hygiene on the way that you've configured the platform, and which features you're using, and which features you're paying for, but you're not even using animals.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (20:31.008)
And I see more often than people will even admit or recognize it could be role changes. It could be champion changes. There's all these different reasons why you have to do that.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (20:41.302)
So to perform this instance review or instance optimization session, a CSM would have to spend hours historically going through the getting permission to access the product usage and then going through the files, seeing what they're using, mapping it to what entitlements they have in their contract, so on and so forth. And now we've built a system where you just throw it all in and it spits out a beautifully looking deck that you can present to the executive team at the customer site.

and let them know exactly this is what you're doing, this is what we can do to continue to optimize your experience. And it's been night and day for us to be able to scale that.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:19.462)
I mean, that's a game changer for variety reasons. Number one, just general scale, but also uniformity. Like I've had, we've all had CSM teams where

certain members of the team are awesome at being able to create assets, whether it's QBR assets or whether it's DAX or report outs or usability reports. And then we've had CSMs who are awesome at the human side of things. Like they're phenomenal CSMs. Maybe they're not so strong at the asset creation or they're not as great at being able to have beautiful infographics that shows the customer what it is. like this is game change where you start to kind of even the playing field, but then also the uniformity piece.

part of me that really likes that you're kind of focusing on some of the main areas or the main deliverables that you know are driving the value to a business because you might have different things that you really need to beat on. That's super duper cool.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (22:13.612)
Yeah, yeah, it's been a game changer for us.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:15.156)
Does it change, Josh, does it change, I guess, the way that CS thinks about, or does it change the way how much people can handle? Does it change workloads? Are we already at the point where because of some of that stuff going away and having the luxury of automation, we think that people can then present X more? we already there? What are you seeing?

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (22:34.99)
100%, 100%. Yeah, we have a CSM. Her first name is Kalpana. She's been with the company for a couple of years, and she's taken it upon herself to really throw herself into AI. She was one of our earliest adopters going back a few quarters ago. And I forget the exact number, but I think she increased her book of business by like 30 % because of that.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:56.18)
Wow, nice.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (22:57.678)
Yeah, and she's able to manage like 30 % greater book of business and do so while reducing her stress. And it was just from, yeah, was from like stitching together all the tools and helping her to automate presentations, do them earlier so they're not, you know, I mean, everybody has a tendency to do things kind of like last minute, but now it was able to, yeah, I'm sure, yeah, never, never, never.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:19.102)
Not me, Josh. Not me. Yeah, right. I'm the worst. I'm the worst. I'm the worst.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (23:24.76)
But yeah, so more work less, more output less stress, probably equal work. That's the thing with AI. We're all talking about like, save time, but I don't know if anybody's really saving time. I we're just doing more. I think I personally am spending more time, to be honest with you, but that's because, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:41.875)
I, me too. So I, it's funny. I love that your brain went there and jumped off on that. Cause I feel the same way. Sometimes I think that there's a, because there's all of these different tools that I've now gotten comfortable with. is a tendency on, on important decisions to maybe overanalyze and over analysis leads to paralysis. And sometimes the best part about business or the best part about, you know, providing a great customer experience or providing an awesome customer success and service. Just make a quick decision. Get a quick answer. Get somebody some information back so that they

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (23:58.03)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:11.868)
like they understand sort of you know which direction things are going to move. Even the book, Josh, like the I hate to say this but the first book that I did almost six plus years ago now without any AI, which was Google, that was way easier than what I'm doing right now because now it's like there's so many different ways to slice into dice and then to compartment and then same thing again, over analysis can lead to paralysis sometimes.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (24:26.978)
That's incredible.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (24:37.742)
What are you writing about now?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:39.452)
So it's make so the title of book is Make Happiness a Habit. And we are literally and this is timing is perfect for you, brother. So we're literally sharing the lessons of the 300 episodes of CX Chronicles. So basically what we're doing is we're it's not a CX book, by the way. This is more of a book for for all of the SMB business founders and owners out there across the world that need help.

with being in really, really difficult spot, man, which is being brave enough to go start your own business, run your own business, grow your own business, and then have to deal with all the rigmarole that comes from it.

I decided to really kind of pull some of the best Golden Nuggets and CTAs across the 300 episodes from some of these, because you know, too, man, you talked about this last week. Like we have this obscene fortune of having talked to like some incredible people, incredible people. Doesn't matter the dollar amount. I'm talking about some of the smartest, brightest, most creative, bravest. And so I wanted to kind of share that. I wanted to I wanted to be able to kind of pull some of those threads out and really kind of share what some of those trends and those themes were and and really kind of give people an idea of how they can kind of

take that notion of making not just customer but employee happiness and then their own personal happiness into the new world in front of us.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (25:51.119)
That's awesome. And I can obviously see the relationship to using AI for what you're doing to pull the transcripts and others. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:56.194)
You can already imagine, and then that's where some of the, can over, exactly, we'll talk more about that.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (26:01.646)
Yeah, I listen, I'm writing a book now as well. I don't know we talked about it or not, but I'm writing a book on the relationships that founders, it's this concept, I don't know the name of it yet, but it's around like this relational founder concept or the advantage that founders have when they're human led. I think that with AI now, and I'm not writing it because of AI, but with AI now, you could argue that there's gonna be this commoditization of products and outcomes that are driven and.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:06.751)
What are you ready for?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:27.923)
Absolutely, 100%.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (26:29.858)
And so what's the founder's unique advantage? Well, it's the relationships that they forge. And so basically I'm going deep and I'm interviewing lots of founders who have been successful. We've had some really cool people like Henry Shuck, the CEO founder of Zoom Info, Manny Medina, the founder of Outreach, Des Traynor, the founder of Intercom, getting Amit Bendoff, the founder of Gong on the show, or not on the show, the, you and I'm basically taking all the recordings and I've got my

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:34.581)
Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:43.924)
sweet.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:51.681)
fantastic.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (26:59.792)
set up to Notion as my kind of workspace. And it takes the transcript and then it identifies the patterns and it maps the patterns to the different chapters that I have. So it suggests which one would be like a primary vignette, which could be a secondary vignette. And then when you have all of that, then you can start writing, right? And I'm not gonna lie, I'm using a little bit of AI for the writing. It's a gray area, right? Like no writer out there is not gonna use any AI right now, like, you know, to write.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:01.983)
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:13.952)
Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:27.009)
100%.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (27:27.938)
But you have to be careful, right? You don't want to over-rotate on it either. But I find that I'm not saving time, that's for sure. I'm spending more time, but I think the output is much better.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:39.042)
That's what I was gonna say. That's my exact same experience, which is at different points I almost viewed it as being disappointing.

Now where I am, because now I'm human writing. So exactly what you just said to be able to extract all of these information statistics, figures, data, years, what it coincides with in market play. Dude, my brain, my silly monkey brain never would have went there. So now that some of those things got pulled out and then exactly what you said about compartmentalization of even chapters and outlines. When I was done with all of this, I was like, wow, this is brilliant.

I still need to go back and literally rewrite this thing from scratch. And that's where we're at right now. But, that's still good. And then I want to add one piece to this, because I know that you're going to appreciate this with the podcast that you do with the book that you're writing. I still think the world, people like us are ahead, Josh, of the world with understanding. Humans haven't yet necessarily categorized what types of grades.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (28:18.286)
I mean, I got it, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:39.585)
of content fuel. So think about when you go to fill up your car with gasoline, you got 87, 89, 93, you got diesel, you got all these different options, right? Or if you're filling up your airplane, you have all sorts of different types of jet fuel classifications, right? We're still living in this world where people haven't necessarily people talk about it at a very high level. Hey, would you listen to a podcast that's built completely by bot? Ask Adr that absolutely not. I would never do that personally. Unless unless someone like Josh or Adrian or Nick Metta or someone like that

built with human organic human curated content and then mind thought play and then what we're talking about with the how to assemble a book for example if it was fueled by that maybe I would look at that if it's if it's just for how to stuff how to do this how to do that but I think that we're in this interesting world too we're like

What we just talked about, even with using the AI to do this stuff, you can literally see the difference of quality that's going to come downstream from anything human created. Even your CSM that you mentioned, the CSM that started, spent a year learning, she learned how to taught herself AI.

Dude, that is compound and levered knowledge, for example. So I wouldn't be surprised if that same individual next year, she might figure out another 10, 15, 20, maybe she had 50 % a year too. So like my point is like, there's still not enough talk about how people are understanding that the garbage is going to be gone to the plebs. Nobody's going to care about that shit that we can already see. Smart people can already see it, by the way, guys. Smart people can already see when you've spent three minutes on an AI project versus

when another smart person spent maybe an hour leveraging AI and then went back to the old school when they spent an hour or two, they spent three hours total putting a deck together that literally reads spells and casts that way. like we're in an interesting time, man, for sure.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (30:34.862)
Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, and they didn't save time, but they got to a next level of output they wouldn't have otherwise. I totally agree with you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (30:40.673)
Josh is a fantastic man and I want to before we get to it, I want to talk about we've bounced through team tools process. I want to make sure I pick your brain of feedback. Spend a couple of minutes kind of, and for you man, because you're in an interesting position where some of the back experience that you've had in your career, but like, can you spend like a minute or two kind of talking about some of the things you've learned along your journey as it relates to.

Some of the best ways or some of the best things you've seen businesses do to not just collect customer and employee feedback, but to get really good at how they're going to take action on it or how they're going to prioritize which items they can actually tackle in a given period of time. I'd love to kind of hear how you think about feedback.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (31:22.094)
Feedback was a big one at BCG. When you think about a consulting company like that, what's their asset? Their only asset for a company like that is human capital, the people that they hire there, right? That's why it's so difficult to be employed by them, or to get the job, I should say, and be employed by them. But so they were very focused on these feedback loops and...

Our venture teams, case teams, as we called them, we would have bi-weekly pulse sessions. And you'd have a facilitator that knew how to facilitate the survey to get the team's temperature and what's working well, what's not working well. And then a group session to discuss the results. And obviously, you try to take action on those things. I don't know how we tracked with it, whether we closed the loop on actually deploying things to take action on the feedback.

But it was a big culture. 360 reviews were big as well. It's a double-edged sword, 360 reviews. I think they're great for getting 360 feedback. It keeps people on their toes, and it gives them kind of the full. I didn't at Update AI. No. No, I thought about it, though. But we were such a small company that you couldn't. Well, part of the benefit of 360 is like.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:29.562)
Did you do them at your business?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:35.829)
You already knew, you already knew it.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (32:42.146)
Sometimes you wanna do it blind too. But if you're, you know, for such a small company, can't do it blind, be like, I know who that person was. But I was tempted to do it. But at the same time, one of the issues with 360 I have found in the past is like, then you sometimes have to be like, it turn you into a people pleaser because you know that their feedback review is going to, you know, impact you at the end of the year in many ways. So you have to be careful.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:50.474)
Right, right.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (33:01.823)
Yeah, yeah, Yep.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (33:12.046)
But yeah, it was a very strong culture of feedback. And one of the things, and I've seen this at Gainsight, and credit to Nick for founding the first layer of this, and credit to Chuck to continuing it, values are really important to an organization. I think when a lot of companies, and I've talked to lot of founders when I'm...

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (33:38.947)
first set of values for your company may not stick. It might just be you kind of in a post-it session riffing with your co-founder. But it's still important, because it's what you stand for. Those values evolve, and eventually they do kind of get a little bit more stuck. And as that happens, think companies that are most effective, they anchor their actions and their key decisions in difficult times, times where the decision is not so easy to make. They anchor them and map them to

their values as a corporation. And I've seen Gainsight do this, and it's something that I think is really respectable, and I think ultimately it's something that drives the best outcome.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:18.996)
It's interesting you say that it makes a ton of sense when shit gets hard. You've already got your, you've got your covenants. You've got the main things that, you know, you've, you've led everybody or yourself to believe is why you're there or why you're doing the things that you're doing. And then, you know what, sometimes that you're right. If you, those, if those were anywhere directionally sound at inception, sometimes it's nice to have automatic process to go to in, in, in, in tough moments. you think about like,

I mean, there's a bunch of examples of it, but I like that. you know, do you think, is there a size that a company passes where it becomes like critical? Meaning, cause I agree with you, small, small, the smaller the business, yeah, it's important and it's good. And it fits inside of the selling picture and all that jazz. But do you think that like there's a size of people that join a team or then you have to have it's paramount. You need to make sure you have some of these,

these North Star things that people kind of understand this is why we're all here. This is what we're supposed to do.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (35:19.614)
I've worked at companies across all the, I've never worked at like a huge like model of company. Maybe the largest company I worked at was Intuit and they had very strong values and product principles for how we built our products and know, Design by Delight was one of, no, Design for Delight.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:37.346)
I feel like I've heard that before somewhere.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (35:40.047)
Yeah, sure. But it stuck. And it was Scott Cook, the former founder, that went around the organization to all the different offices, and it was evangelizing it. So it takes work. It takes work. You have to be intentional about it from the very top. I've worked at the NFL. I don't think I could tell you what the NFL's core values are, to be honest with you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:51.808)
Yeah, yeah,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:59.875)
The NFL is a chubby little pig my friend. I love watching on Sundays, but it's a chubby little pig.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (36:08.408)
So I don't know. I don't know at what point it gets. I'm sure if you're a company like, I don't know, name a huge company, it's difficult, but it's still very important.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:18.37)
Well, here's what I'm picking on it. We're about to enter this world where we're about to have companies that are fucking huge from a revenue perspective with a little bad ass Navy SEAL team running it. We're about to enter the world of, it's to be very realistic for companies that get to 25, 50, maybe even a hundred million bucks with these small, tight, super sophisticated, leveraging all the stuff that we're talking about. And you know what you got me thinking, man, is like,

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (36:27.79)
Yeah.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (36:38.284)
Yeah, 10 person team,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:43.842)
that becomes more, that's more fraternal or that's more of like a thing where like, you're gonna want people to buy into shit from day one if that's gonna be the type of thing that you're gonna go to battle together and then the risk, the reward, you're taking it together, baby. So like.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (36:52.472)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it needs to, you know what, also needs to start at the hiring level. So the other thing that we did at BCG is we would, one of the interview questions I remember that we had asked would be basically like something to the effect of like, choose one of our, here's our values, talk to your background in one of these values. And do they live our values was one of the, you know.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:16.502)
Okay.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (37:22.51)
questions that we would ask ourselves as we went through the panel and evaluated people.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:26.612)
Interesting interesting Josh has been fantastic before we start to wind down What are some of big things that that that you and the team at Cane's head are excited about for this year anything that you want to shout out any announcements any upcoming events or any any anything Bigger exciting that you want everybody to know about Okay

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (37:48.015)
I'll be quick. Atlas is our agentic AI product. We've rolled that out now to several partners, and it's continued to expand. And we're super excited about what Atlas is doing for automating autonomous, agentic renewals and expansion and now adoption, sending those agents out to companies that have a long tail of customers.

We have the MCP, is super exciting for us, for our customers and users. We've got polls coming up in Las Vegas at the end of May. And then I'll do my personal plugs, which is Unchurned, my podcast for post sales and customer success. And the book, I'm writing the book actually. If go to joshactor.com, I just spun up.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:19.303)
Pulse, one of the biggest ones, brother, one of the biggest shows in our space.

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (38:36.787)
a beehive blog newsletter for like behind the scenes for me writing the book.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:39.978)
Nice. Nice. Wait, wait, and then when this is done, brother, we're gonna have to have you come back on because it's not an easy feat, Anytime I meet with a fellow...

fellow writer dude people don't it's it's it's hard and it's difficult and it's an interesting journey and all of us have different journeys and then all of us learn different ways from this thing but it is it's awesome i'm pumped i'm pumped to get my hands on it and then i'm pumped to stay in touch man it's been oh last thing where can people get in touch with you my friend if they want to learn more about some of the stuff you're doing or if they want to learn more about the work that you and the team are doing at gatesight

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:21.162)
I love it. Josh, thank you so much for joining us, brother. It's been an absolute pleasure,

Josh Schachter (Gainsight) (39:24.739)
Thanks, Adrian. All right, have a great day.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:26.647)
Thank you.