Learn about the process behind how a hyperscaled enterprise software company approaches Growth with Rishi Mallik, SVP of growth and marketing at Workato, as he shares his tech odyssey from pioneering at Quik to driving mobile video at Skype. This episode peels back the layers of enterprise automation and how Rishi's knack for distilling complex tech has supercharged Workato's growth. As our host, Rajiv Parikh explores Rishi's journey and producer Sandeep Parikh sprinkles in layman's terms, we get a glimpse of Rishi's Stanford Bhangra days, a testament to the vibrant personality behind the professional.
Our chat with Rishi takes a deep dive into the pivotal role growth marketing plays in the success of a business. We unpack the wealth of experiences that led him from venture capitalism to the thrills of entrepreneurship, reuniting with old colleagues, and how they're shaping Workato's future. Get an insider look at the marketing and revenue application jungle, why core tools are vital for cohesive strategies, and how automation is the linchpin for transforming dormant data into dynamic action.
As we round off our conversation, the synergy between Bhaskar and Rishi comes into full focus. We unravel the essence of trust, the division of tasks in teamwork, and how different approaches foster a robust project execution. The episode wraps up with a tease of what lies ahead, pondering how a growth mindset could revolutionize traditional industries and hinting at Rishi's creative ventures in the pipeline. Tune in for this rich exchange of wisdom, laughter, and those sparks that light the way to innovation.
Learn about the process behind how a hyperscaled enterprise software company approaches Growth with Rishi Mallik, SVP of growth and marketing at Workato, as he shares his tech odyssey from pioneering at Quik to driving mobile video at Skype. This episode peels back the layers of enterprise automation and how Rishi's knack for distilling complex tech has supercharged Workato's growth. As our host, Rajiv Parikh explores Rishi's journey and producer Sandeep Parikh sprinkles in layman's terms, we get a glimpse of Rishi's Stanford Bhangra days, a testament to the vibrant personality behind the professional.
Our chat with Rishi takes a deep dive into the pivotal role growth marketing plays in the success of a business. We unpack the wealth of experiences that led him from venture capitalism to the thrills of entrepreneurship, reuniting with old colleagues, and how they're shaping Workato's future. Get an insider look at the marketing and revenue application jungle, why core tools are vital for cohesive strategies, and how automation is the linchpin for transforming dormant data into dynamic action.
As we round off our conversation, the synergy between Bhaskar and Rishi comes into full focus. We unravel the essence of trust, the division of tasks in teamwork, and how different approaches foster a robust project execution. The episode wraps up with a tease of what lies ahead, pondering how a growth mindset could revolutionize traditional industries and hinting at Rishi's creative ventures in the pipeline. Tune in for this rich exchange of wisdom, laughter, and those sparks that light the way to innovation.
Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. We're going to talk to founders, innovators, ceos, investors, designers and artists. I'm talking game changers about their big world shaping ideas and what sparked them. I'm your host, Rajiv Parikh. I'm the founder and CEO of Position Squared, a growth marketing company based in Palo Alto. So, yes, I'm a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but I'm also a business news junkie and a history. I'm fascinated by how big world changing movements go from the spark of an idea to an innovation that reshapes our lives. In every episode, we're going to do a deep dive with our guests about what led them to their own eureka moments and how they're going about executing it. And, perhaps most importantly, how do they get other people to believe in them so that their idea could also someday become a spark for the ages. This is the Spark of Ages podcast. In addition to myself, we have our producer, Sandeep, who will occasionally chime in to make sure we don't get too in the weeds with tech jargon.
Sandeep Parikh:Yes, that's me, and I'm occasionally chiming in. Right now, I'm really excited about this episode. Man, again, I'm going to learn about automation, automation nation. I'm also going to count the number of times that you guys say workflow, workflow, work, cato, you win if it's above 20. There we go.
Rajiv Parikh:So, really, yeah, really go for it, Awesome. Well, we have Rishi Mallik, and I'm really pumped about talking to Rishi on this. He's an entrepreneur. He has worked in small companies, big companies and acquisitions. He's a. He loves growth, which is a nebulous term, but it's an. It's enabled his company to grow and expand dramatically. And what I liked about him is that he could take really complicated concepts and distill them into fairly straightforward language, and then the way he drives a company's growth is by telling easy to understand stories about their complex technology. So, and Rishi's a super smart guy, lots of fun, and I'm just super glad to have him.
Sandeep Parikh:Those sound bites. You need to be good at that. He's a pro.
Rajiv Parikh:He's into bites and he's into recipes. So let me tell you a little bit about Rishi at Worka to, which is the current company that is at. Rishi is the SVP of growth and marketing for Work ato, a new age integration platform allowing folks to automate workflows across the enterprise, taking something that was super technical in the past and making it accessible to all business users and also for technical users, allowing them to speed up the ability to drive rapid transformation across their organization. They are Gartner and Forrester leaders in the automation space. Rishi's career started in the consumer internet space at companies like Mozilla. You remember them.
Sandeep Parikh:They were the early browsers in the modem days, oh so, when, like, pictures were still downloading like a layer at a time. That's right, and you had to hear all these beeps, yeah, yeah, what?
Rajiv Parikh:And then, after that, he worked at this company called Quik. So, instead of going for one of the big companies like Google or Intuit, rishi worked at this company called Quik, where he joined this founding team there in 2007 at the age of 21. So previously, the Quik service offered a mobile based live video sharing website and two way video conferencing application pre FaceTime, facetime that allowed users to stream live video from their cell phones to the internet. At Quik, rishi led business development and, at the age that he was at, he closed deals with six of the seven top mobile handset manufacturers and three of the four top US mobile carriers While he was at Quik. He later became the head of product for Quik and led the development and launch of the first mobile video chat application in the US, with 16 million users.
Rajiv Parikh:Way back when Quik was acquired by Skype for $150 million and Rishi became the principal program manager of mobile for Skype. At Skype, he led video initiatives across all platforms, including the launch of Skype video messaging, which at the time, had over 250 million users. And where did he start from? Of course, he graduated from Stanford University, where he studied engineering and business, and was the VP of the business association of Stanford engineering students and of course he was the captain of use, a mean Bhangra at Brown.
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, rishi was the captain of the Stanford Bhangra team. What I got to throw down with him because you know I did some Bhangra back in my day I wonder how he automated learning Bhangra. That's what I'm curious about there you go.
Rajiv Parikh:Did you ever compete against them when you were brown?
Sandeep Parikh:Nothing. Well, we did. We did go to the national. So we went to. You know, there's like a big national competition in Georgetown but because ours was a Bhangra step hip hop like fusion dance, we weren't allowed to compete in the you know puritanical Bhangra only dancing. So we were like we ended up being the sort of you know, intermission show. But we crushed it, you know, because, of course, I whipped out some of my old gymnastics skills back when I still had moves, Did some backflips, blew some minds. You can do those backflips. Yeah, it was great. Well, this is a great interview, so excited for you to hear it. So now let's jump to our interview with Rishi Mallik. Well, we found out from Rishi Rishi's bio that you are a Bhangra captain. A Bhangra captain, Right, I was a Bhangra captain.
Rishi Mallik:How you retired now. I'm retired. We were wondering, you know?
Rajiv Parikh:like Sunday also at Brown did Bungra. So we were wondering if you guys actually competed against each other at any point.
Rishi Mallik:What year were you Interesting At Stanford? Yeah, it was 08.
Sandeep Parikh:08. Okay, now you're younger than I am. I don't think we crossed paths, unfortunately.
Rishi Mallik:What year were you? We were 02. Yeah, you may have crossed paths with my brother. My brother was on the USC Bhangra team.
Sandeep Parikh:Okay, maybe I was. I mean, I went one year to the finals at Georgetown. We did this whole competition. We were not in the competition, we were a fusion dance, we were a Bhangra step hip hop dance.
Rajiv Parikh:Okay, yeah, yeah.
Sandeep Parikh:So we were like more of a, you know, intermission act, but it was cool, it was really fun.
Rajiv Parikh:I wonder how you? How do you score Bhangra?
Rishi Mallik:Well, half of it is like how traditional can you be? And half of it's a bunch of these like whiz bang gimmicks and sort of you know how many people can you put on top of each other?
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, so it's a little bit of a little bit of both. And see how many people are out of their seats also dancing along with you. Everyone like turning the light bulb.
Rajiv Parikh:It's a light bulb turning technique and your shoulder, and your shoulder.
Sandeep Parikh:That's right. How many light bulbs do you turn on? Yeah, exactly.
Rajiv Parikh:Sounds like one of some of these videos. Okay, so, rishi, great to have you on with us today.
Rishi Mallik:Thanks for having me.
Rajiv Parikh:One of the reasons I really wanted to have you as part of this podcast series is we are talking to great innovators, or people believe we believe our great innovators, and one of the things I really liked about you was you have this way of telling stories. You are able to take complex subjects and make it straightforward and in the way you then drive it to market it's an experimental method that you use and you keep iterating on it. That and plus this entrepreneurial background right, I think. When you were at school, you are at Stanford you joined all these startups and they all failed but you kept going for more.
Rajiv Parikh:Just asking for it, so I thought that, like a person like that who's worked his way through startups, getting acquired at some point to bigger companies and just continuing with that journey, would just be so interesting for us. So thank you for coming here. We've met on multiple occasions and I just actually really enjoy the story about workato, the current company that you're at. It's in the application technology integration space, which is pretty nebulous, right? People will call this I pass, and one of my friends was saying oh yeah, we're caught up, I pass company. I was like you know, I just listened to their presentation and not once did they mention I pass. So help me understand how you guys think about marketing a company like that.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely a journey. I think we'll, first off, thank you for having me, rajiv. In terms of so the I pass story is hilarious that you mentioned that because, to be honest, what does I pass mean anyways?
Rishi Mallik:So I pass is integration platform as a service. So I think it's lowercase I capital P, lowercase a lowercase a capital S Got it. I knew it was as a service. Exactly, you can get self driving cars as a service now, which is cool.
Rishi Mallik:But you know, the interesting thing with workato is it just depends on your audience, right. And the curse that we have as a company is that, theoretically, any department inside an org can leverage workato. Every department is using some sort of cloud system, some sort of cloud application. Those applications don't talk to each other and how we do work across, you know, with people and with our applications, it's not happening in just one application, it's happening across applications and so getting data in and out and getting data to the right people at the right time to take action, that's really where you need sort of an integration platform, and so now you can explain that as an I pass or you can explain that as automation or a workflow tool. So you know, everyone comes from any of these departments that end up leveraging workato. They come from so many different backgrounds. I think it is used to very much developer, healthy tools and a lot of these integration platforms from the past were built as developer tools, and so I pass is much more of a common vernacular in that.
Rajiv Parikh:So I mean there, there, I remember I'm going to date myself again there was this whole space called enterprise application integration, which was super technical and they'd come up with these super elaborate things. I mean, are you guys sort of as EAI is to Siebel? You guys are sort of like the sales force of integration, like making it simpler, maybe the hub spot or somewhere in between. That you're not Zapier, right? Which is like which is a great product?
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, or mule soft. We're not mule soft. We were built for the cloud right, and you know everything. A majority of work now is happening in the cloud. There's still some use cases for sort of on-prem systems and we'll connect into them, but we're a cloud native. We were built for the cloud. And the second thing is that we were not necessarily built just as a developer tool. So a lot of these you know legacy not even, I would say, platforms, but more so legacy tools. The only way that you could do integration before was it to be another way to code the integration. Right, we've now kind of office gated that to some degree where those integrations don't need to be coded anymore. They're already done for you. Now it's about bring your business logic. Bring your business logic to us and you know you can easily set that up. That's no longer the long tail, that's the so you don't have to write code anymore.
Rishi Mallik:You don't have to write code anymore.
Rajiv Parikh:Is that they call that. What Low code, low code, low code In some case no code.
Sandeep Parikh:No code, baby.
Rishi Mallik:So the thing is that if you do want to write code and you do want to also like, bring in some of that developer and host power, like the tool, allow you to do that. But a lot of you know 80% of what you're trying to do with business logic doesn't require that sort of heavy lifting, and so we're taking that out of the game.
Rajiv Parikh:That's amazing.
Sandeep Parikh:So here's what I want to know, Rishi how do you describe, how do your parents tell your friends about what you do? You know, it's so funny.
Rajiv Parikh:Why aren't you a doctor?
Sandeep Parikh:I am so mild. Besides that, that's what was the first time.
Rishi Mallik:I was pre-med for a quarter. Oh there you go and then took organic chemistry and then that was the end of that.
Sandeep Parikh:You gave them hope, you gave them a glimmer of hope and then pulled the rug out.
Rishi Mallik:Fortunately for me, my brother's a physician and so we kind of checked that box so I got a little bit of leeway there. But my first company that we did was a company called Quick. It was a consumer internet space. We built the first mobile video chat application, so essentially FaceTime before FaceTime. That company was acquired by Skype and then Skype was acquired by Microsoft and I was at Microsoft for approximately two years and two days and since then and that was 2013. So it's been about a decade. Until this day, the only thing my mom remembers from anything in my career is that oh yeah, my son, you've worked at Microsoft.
Rajiv Parikh:By the way, rishi, yeah, they remember the brand name I have a crazy story about the Microsoft.
Rajiv Parikh:So early on in our startup at Position Squared, we started hiring these folks from India and the guy basically, after six months, quit Okay. And he said look, I have a plan. And I said what's your plan? My goal is eventually to work for Microsoft, and so I'm going to work here and then I'm going to take a job at SAS and then I'm going to get to Microsoft. And I said why are you doing that? And he said well, I want to find a good marriage partner, and the best way for me to find a good marriage partner is to work for a prestigious company.
Rishi Mallik:It's a resume Prestige.
Sandeep Parikh:He needs more credits on his bio data. There you go Bio data. Yeah, you got to boost that resume, but you to answer your question.
Rishi Mallik:That's the only thing my mom actually remembers from.
Rajiv Parikh:Well, but if you have a chance to explain it to your mom today, she'll say Rishi, what do you do? What do you say you do?
Rishi Mallik:You know, it's actually really interesting is that when I talked to so, I did about a venture capital before I joined on with with Ricardo, and so in that regard, mom understood that, which was mom. You know, we're working with founders and we're helping them go to market, and now I joined on with one of those companies to build out the go to market team, and so that was so.
Rajiv Parikh:It's like the Remington thing. I liked it so much.
Rishi Mallik:Well, it wasn't that. I was asking for it. Right, I was, you know, living the life of a venture capitalist. I don't know if we're going to have any VCs on this podcast, it's. It was nice being on the other side of the table. It's a very it's a very different lifestyle than being in the trenches and building out a company. But I missed that. I missed the. It was nice being on the other side of the table, but I missed that adrenaline rush of kind of being in the trenches and you know those like burning the midnight oil. And so it's been now about over five years that we've been sort of building, building workado, but it's fun to be back in it and you did it with one of your, one of the folks you worked with at at quick right.
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, yeah so.
Rishi Mallik:Basker and Vijay. So Basker and I we co-lead the marketing org at Rokato. Basker and I did quick together and then Vijay was the CEO of quick. Vijay is now the CEO of Rokato. Wow, vijay's story is actually really interesting. So he was I mean his background dates before quick. He was one of the on the founding team of a company called Tipco, if you've heard of Tipco.
Rajiv Parikh:Maybe explain it for audience.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, it considers one of the forefathers in the integration space. Back in the early 90s, um and uh, tipco, you know, ipo, I think it was around 04. And then Vijay um was sort of brought on to Oracle to work with Thomas Corian and Larry Ellison to build out the fusion middleware division of Oracle, which I think now is one of the most profitable divisions. But if you think about middleware it's essentially sitting between software and hardware. And then when Vijay was at Oracle he was an investor in quick and then decided to join on full time. But fast forward to now or before the beginning of Rokato, you know, vijay essentially saw what the integration space has turned into and how much more opportunity there is there and how much work still needs to be done. Right, it was still a very like we talked about before, developer centric sort of topic and how can we really open up the possibilities to business, teams and business?
Rajiv Parikh:work. I mean it's like even in the marketing space, right. There's some 11,000 marketing and revenue applications.
Rishi Mallik:And so in your mind.
Rajiv Parikh:does the world need another application?
Rishi Mallik:No, If anyone's seen the the, the more tech, I think what is it?
Rajiv Parikh:It was used to be a great girl.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, it was like smart tech seven thousand, I think, now it's even 11,000.
Rishi Mallik:Is it 11,000 now? But you know, if you've gone the last marketing conference that you've gone to, it's turned into really this over optimized set of very narrow point solutions of the customer journey. So there's an application for this part of the journey and this part of the journey and this part of the journey, and if you end up spending money on a lot of these applications, what you end up building is a lot of tech debt. Right, there's a lot of these applications that are sitting there with with data silos, and so there are a couple of core applications that you need. You need your CRM, you might need a marketing cooking tool like a marketo or a hub spot. You might need a some way to do some sort of outbounding, like an outreach or a sales loft and an enrichment tool, and once you have those sort of tools, everything else can kind of be stitched together and that's really where you know a tool like Rokado would fit in to run sort of the rest of your go to market.
Rajiv Parikh:Right, I mean, if you don't want to jump from application to application every time, you want to do something like people are happy working in Slack.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, that's where people spend most of their time. Actually, it's funny you mentioned that, because what we've seen is that a lot of these automations are not just pulling data from one application to another, it's also getting data to people's fingertips quickly. An example of this is that we had a sort of like a business intelligence tool that was giving us some sort of usage data of potential prospects and sort of intent and intent based tool, and a lot of that intent data lived on the website where somebody had to go and log in and then they can pull the intent data. For the first year nobody went in logged in to pull the intent, but when we started just a simple automation to bring that intent data whenever it happened to people's fingertips on Slack, it was a complete 180.
Rajiv Parikh:Right, You're turning. You're turning shelf wearer yeah, shelf wearer into something usable.
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, right, okay. So I'm trying to wrap my brain around all the jargon, but I think I'm getting it. I think I'm getting it Like, so, like you're trying to improve the latency, like between you being able to having to go find the data versus it sort of appearing Right, like you're kind of decreasing the lag time, what I like to call it.
Rishi Mallik:I like to call it like sort of the last mile. Ah, you're the bird. Right, If you think about it you know there's so much I mean there's podcasts like this there's so much material online to learn about strategies of what you can do or what you want to do or what you need to do. You know, for example, you like picking. If somebody's bought from you before, there's a good chance if they go to a different company that they're going to buy from you again.
Sandeep Parikh:It's a really good strategy.
Rajiv Parikh:My company lives on that.
Rishi Mallik:It's a well known strategy. People know that they need to do it, but then there's that last mile of the how, like how do I get that data to the right people to take action on it? And making that easier is really the difference between an idea and it actually being executed.
Rajiv Parikh:Right. So now, all of a sudden, you can basically say folks. You can have something that monitors, like on LinkedIn, someone moved from here to here. It then launches something, some, it then sends a signal that some application may be catching. But then you're what you do with workado. Is you enable that to be seen by the right person in their slack feed?
Rishi Mallik:Exactly. Another really cool one has been with with sales reps is you know, there's it's always a tough thing after a meeting and you have another one coming up and you met with the prospect and you need to go into sales force and put in notes and so on and so forth, making it easier on them where, hey, that call just ended. Zoom knows that call ended. Let me and then we also know, based on their calendar, or from zoom or from gong, who was on the call. Let me go ping that sales rep on slack and let them know hey, you just had this call. We might be able to even pull tidbits from the call If the call the call.
Rajiv Parikh:Have some preset notes from the call and already do the transcribe transcribe for you.
Rishi Mallik:Hey, does this sound right? And then, oh, by the way, hey, were the competitors mentioned? Or like what's the next step here? So they can go and do that themselves if they go log into their sales force or whatever CRM that they're using. But again, it's that ease of use that you're bringing to the table which is game changing.
Sandeep Parikh:That's amazing. Yeah, they scooted. They scoot it over to you on that bird. I get it Very cool. So how did you become the senior vice president of growth marketing?
Rajiv Parikh:So the most nebulous term, what? What does it mean to be a growth? He's? I don't even think it's marketing in his title, I think it's just growth.
Rishi Mallik:It is Mr Growth, I mean. The beauty of the title is that it is nebulous.
Rajiv Parikh:Everybody wants to know. When you go up to people you're like I'm the growth guy.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, you, I mean you just want. I mean, as long as you want something to go up into the right right, that's growth. Unless it's cost, then you don't want that to go up into the right. But I think of growth as a mindset. It really is a mindset and you know, for us we apply the growth mindset. My day to day is my team is applying that growth mindset to any sort of pipeline generating channel on the marketing side. So for us that's events drive potential pipeline. The sales development org, the SDR team doing outbounding, drives pipeline. The website drives pipeline. Any paid acquisition, seo, sem, those kind of things, try pipeline. But in terms of the mindset, you know the two things, there's two mantras and if my team hears this they're going to love it.
Rajiv Parikh:They're going to lose their mind. I got to listen to this Suddenly. We're going to beep. We're going to bleep that part out for his team.
Rishi Mallik:Thank you.
Rajiv Parikh:We're going to do a personalized version of this where, if Rishi's team comes, up right?
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, because they would just exit out if they heard this. So one is, I call it the magic number of nine, and honestly, the significance of nine is not very significant. But the reason I call it the magic number of nine is basically the idea is having multiple approaches ready to any problem that you're looking to solve Right. So if we're doing, for example, we want to launch an ad for a product, right To launch that ad, you can do it on multiple platforms.
Rishi Mallik:When you choose a platform that you want to do it on, you can choose multiple different formats Is it text, is it audio, is it video, is it animated? Is it, is it a real human? And then you can also choose a demographic of who you're actually targeting that ad to. And so if somebody were to do an experiment, they have an ad budget, two teams have an ad budget and they're going to go run that ad, and the team that runs that ad to nine different demographics, with nine different ad copy, with nine different images, is inevitably going to be more successful than the team that runs it to one demographic with one image, with a simple AB test.
Rishi Mallik:AB test, abc test, so on and so forth. Right, so the multi variant testing? The thing is, is the academia has really taught us to get to the right answer as quickly as possible, and we're not tuned to doing this.
Rajiv Parikh:Right, the reason we take an initial leap Right and then we're like, wow, that's amazing and I'm done.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, is this confirmation bias? Yeah, you know, I think the number. And this leads me to the second mantra, which is not just growth mindset, but I think it's also very important from an entrepreneurship perspective, which is, know that you're not going to hit the nail on the head the first time around and be okay with that. Like, if you are hitting the nail on the head the first time around every time, either you're Michael Jordan Right or or or you're probably not reaching high enough.
Rajiv Parikh:You're setting your sights way too low.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, you should never be in that spot Right, not if you're a real entrepreneur, exactly If you're a real entrepreneur and you know that you're already going to fail. So you should have test two, test three, test four ready to go, and so those two things. We've taken that mentality to all things, sort of pipeline generating, and hence so so do they?
Rajiv Parikh:do they basically then come to you as part of this growth mantra. Is this they or growth? Do you have a growth framework and you're forcing them, or you're looking for people who have that experimental, engineering, scientific mindset and they're literally putting a framework in front of you, how they're going to test?
Rishi Mallik:I don't think if you, if you don't have a framework, I don't think you can test.
Rishi Mallik:I think one of the things, the beauty of my background, is actually in product and I think the beauty of some of the things that we can learn from product teams is product teams have very structured product management, agile philosophies, right. So if you think about scrum and things of that sort, but it's beautiful because it incrementally always leads to some sort of gain and at a predictable basis. So you know that if you're running week sprints, two week sprints, that you're going to have some sort of increment and that you know that how long something might take and how many sprints, and therefore you can predict how long it's going to take. You can actually apply some of that to my opinion, to marketing. So we do that. So all of my teams have a backlog, for example, and they have. So they have funnels for their, for their channels, and then they have benchmarks for those funnels and then they have a backlog of how am I going to beat those benchmarks. So we're never stagnant at a certain benchmark. There's always some sort of incremental increase happening from that.
Rajiv Parikh:That's really cool. Yeah, that's really cool. It's hard to do. It is, I'd say as a person that started a company, all about experimentation in marketing. Right, taking an engineering approach to marketing. You can say that and people will repeat it back to you, but when push comes to shove, a lot of times they'll go cheat and they'll go with the best answer, and I think the hardest part is to put that metric in front of them and literally keep going at it.
Rishi Mallik:Showing it to them?
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, and it's like showing and showing it to the whole organization that this is where we're going, and then everyone has to get committed to it, because people like to do when slammed with a lot of things, people want to do the urgent, but not necessarily the important the important Right.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, there's also. I mean. This is why, again going back to the importance of knowing that you're not going to hit the nail on the head the first time around, like I would like to see that number actually go down a couple of times. Right, that means that we're actually throwing Hail. Mary's and we're trying something, yeah, but to your point, making it visible again, it's getting data to the right people at the right time. Making it visible, like having monitors up in the office about the key metric is like a really valuable thing.
Rajiv Parikh:It keeps everyone. Would you learn that? Did you learn that in quick? Did you learn that prior to, prior to quick? Did you learn it at? It says in your background you have a degree in management and engineering. I don't know if that's a real thing.
Rishi Mallik:I it's, it's, it's. It's funny, my, my degree.
Rajiv Parikh:Where did you learn that? Or did you learn from your Independent major?
Sandeep Parikh:Was it? I went to Brown so we could make up our majors. I don't know if that was the same thing at Stanford. You could, you could and this sounds like a made up one, but it's. It's funny.
Rishi Mallik:So the the major is management, science and engineering, which is essentially three words put together. And when I first heard about it, it actually means nothing, but the beauty of it actually is it's, it's cool, it actually is. You know, you, you do your first two years doing engineering fundamentals and then you do your last two years doing a lot of B school courses. So a little bit of a technical background with the design.
Rishi Mallik:No, but I think I learned it. Uh received the hard way A lot of those startups, for example, that I worked at, uh when I was in school. Uh, like you said, they, most of them, ended up failing right, and so, seeing just how not successful things are when you're out of it, when you're out of it, you all you hear is the successes right. You hear about the Facebooks and Microsoft's and the Amazons and so on and so forth. But then when you're in it and you see that the majority of people are not making it, emerging these companies are not making it you realize that the right answer isn't just right around the corner.
Rajiv Parikh:So you come into work harder with that or do you come into quick with that Cause? You did product at quick, you did business development at quick. Was there something that that just resonated? Hey, I'm. These are people I enjoy experiments with.
Rishi Mallik:What I learned is that in academia, you're trying to get to the right answer as quickly as possible.
Rajiv Parikh:Trying to get a 90 something.
Rishi Mallik:And there is a right, but there's always a right answer. That's right, and the interesting thing is that in the real world you don't have perfect information. So if you don't have perfect information, the only way to figure that out is by testing and iterating and bringing that into. I think that's the the delta that we move out, lose out from not having vocational learning as brought in. This is a whole different topic, but not having vocational learning more in the educational system. But that's where you learn is that you know. When you don't have perfect information, how do you figure out the right answer?
Sandeep Parikh:Well it's. I mean I love this because I mean I have a four year old and I think about this all the time, like about what his educational path is going to be right and this concept there's a little bit of yoga in this to me, where you're describing that like being comfortable in the discomfort of of knowing you will fail and that you should. You're supposed to be defining the idea of failure right. It's like failure is just the stepping stone on the path towards successes, which I love.
Rajiv Parikh:I would even take it a different way since, since Rishi talked about you know the notion of a growth mindset right. So this Carol Jweck out of Stanford wrote the book on mindset right and I think the thing that I just read it again recently and I think one of the things that really resonated with me was that most of the time when we're learning actually kind of hurts. So when you're in the process of learning something new, you're stumbling, you're failing, it doesn't feel good. So if you're comfortable and just like you're working out, you're lifting same thing right, pay no pain, no gain. And so if you take that in terms of what you're doing at work and you become comfortable with that and say that, yes, I'm supposed to experience this difficulty and pain, not run away from it, right.
Rajiv Parikh:That totally changes your mindset and the mindset of others.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, and you know, the other thing that I think is helpful is if you actually break that problem that you're challenged, that whatever project that you're taking on, if you actually break it into smaller steps, what you end up seeing is that, because the end outcome might not be there, right. So, like, if you're trying to go from zero to 100 and you're not getting to 100, you'll feel sad, right. But if you break that problem into zero to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, then your zero to 10 might be working, but your 10 to 20 might not, but your 20 to 30 is working and you're getting, but you're not getting to 20.
Rishi Mallik:So you are getting wins, you're getting wins along the way You're getting small wins along the way. And so that actually helps a lot mentally breaking it down. But then what it also does is that it teaches you not to just either throw more into the top or kind of just like throw everything, prioritize, prioritize, you, prioritize, like where your actual problems are along that journey.
Rajiv Parikh:That's great. Did you see that when you were like, so you were working on video, right, you got into video way before people were doing video back and forth, right, I was at Disney once way, way back when we were at Epcot. They had those video phones and that was like the next great thing. It was very Jetsons like. And then you get on it and you, like, you know, make your reservation on the video phone. Is that what inspired you guys, when you guys were thinking about I can do video to video communication. Were you thinking Jetsons, epcot?
Rishi Mallik:What really inspired me was I had just moved into my first apartment and I missed mom's cooking, and so mom cooks amazing Indian food. First had to get the list of ingredients, which was like 26 ingredients for one dish.
Rajiv Parikh:You don't get them in packs like you do today. You know like.
Rishi Mallik:I want a spice pack, exactly They'll give you the ingredients.
Sandeep Parikh:They will not give you the measurements. I don't know if you have the same experience with your mom, the problem is that I got the ingredients.
Rishi Mallik:I'm standing there, I'm talking to mom on the phone. And mom's like oh yeah, just a little bit of that and a little bit of this, and I'm like mom, what is a little bit?
Rajiv Parikh:It tasted disgusting.
Rishi Mallik:Like I, completely ruined the dish. That's where the inspiration came from. I was like, hey, how cool would it be, is I'm talking to mom right now and I can show her?
Sandeep Parikh:what is a little?
Rishi Mallik:bit Like what is how much this spoon, that spoon, what color should it look like right now? Those kind of things and that was the so my mom, even though she doesn't necessarily know what I do today was my inspiration in that regard.
Sandeep Parikh:That's perfect so you're fiending for Gossop is really what For better curry.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, really what inspired you? For the record, I still can't cook Indian food, but I can make some badass chai.
Sandeep Parikh:No, it's not our fault.
Rishi Mallik:I just told my mom it's not our fault, you know we get.
Sandeep Parikh:we eat cup sizes, we eat teaspoon sizes.
Rajiv Parikh:There you go, so, but you went into this direction, right, you could have worked for Google or Intuit, or I mean Stanford here. You were just connected to everyone, right, so not hard to find a job at, even then 2008, that's Facebook right, you could have done that. Why go down this startup route? Did you just enjoy paying? Is that just fun?
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, it's, yeah, I know, I didn't know which way it was until I got into it. Why not?
Rajiv Parikh:the easy path I had. I had Cause you were like 21,. Right, I was 21, yeah.
Rishi Mallik:I had an offer from Google and an offer from Intuit and offer from McKinsey and I met a gentleman at Stanford Networking Event and his name was Bostker, who we talked about earlier and he was. He had like a little demo of video chat. It wasn't a mobile video chat at that time, it was from, you know, web to web or phone to web, but it was still some sort of demo of it and I remember seeing it and thinking to myself like man, like cell phones are the next big thing and phones at that time this is before the first iPhones were really dating ourselves at this point. But the first iPhone, if you guys remember it had, it didn't even do video. The one the cameras came out on these phones, they took photo and then slowly they started doing video.
Rajiv Parikh:It was basically an iPod phone, right, that's what it was.
Rishi Mallik:Right. So I remember sending him an email later that night, like a six page email about like hey, how cool would it be if we did this on phones. And then he called me up the next day and he was like hey, do you want to come work for us? Like this would be cool. And then I went to meet with them and it was three guys literally in a garage. So the servers were built out in the garage we were.
Rishi Mallik:We had our own servers at that time because of the latency of live video and so on and so forth, and then, I remember thinking to myself like okay, that or Google. And it's funny, I took this course at Stanford, my first year there. That and I only took it because my roommate told me that they had free food. It was-.
Rajiv Parikh:Food is a big motivator.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, I didn't even know what the course was.
Rajiv Parikh:Clearly.
Rishi Mallik:And I had a he's like it's one unit, they have free food, just join. And I just quickly signed up and it turned out that it was called the Entrepreneurs Thought Leader Seminar and basically it was entrepreneurs, CEOs, co-founders that were coming in and speaking on their story and what they've done, and then they were such prominent figures that even people from the neighborhood would want to come and see it and that's why there was sort of food and networking afterwards. In any case, the first person that came to speak was Tripp Hawkins, who you may know is the founder of EA, Electronic Arts and just hearing his story in regards to his love, passion for video games and turning it into this multinational and multinational- organization.
Rishi Mallik:And that was now. Entrepreneurship is so well known. The concept of it back then I mean to a small select few was known, but my idea of entrepreneurship was starting your own small business, which is entrepreneurship. But I'd never seen it at this scale and I'd never seen. And it was so nice hearing people's dreams turn into reality. And after I wrote that email and I saw kind of what it would be like to help build something from the ground up, that's really what took me there.
Rajiv Parikh:That's amazing, that's amazing, it's an amazing story.
Sandeep Parikh:I'm reminded again of my four year old. He has this little tickle when he starts to like catch onto an idea, when he like really grasps something. He started to count to 100 and he just gets this little giggle. When he like gets it and I'm learning from him I'm like, oh, I gotta follow the tickle, follow the tickle, follow the tickle. You know that thing, like when you see that video phone and you're like, oh man, this is something right and sounds like to me. I followed the tickle.
Rajiv Parikh:You're like, okay, it's not Google it's not Google or maybe was it something like that, where there's this sensation you get. But I actually think that some of this is, in a way, you've had an experience much earlier, or you see something in your parents or your community or something that makes you say that's interesting to me yeah, so my parents being immigrant parents.
Rishi Mallik:When I was in school, I remember I had a screensaver that had just photos of the family and there was one photo that I just kept as my background, which was my immediate family, and every time I was like before midterm or a final exam and I was just thinking about man, like this is so hard I would look at that photo and realize how much easier I still have it than them, who basically they picked up their life in India and came here with nothing and started from scratch, and so when times were tough, just thinking about that story, it really helped along the way. It was almost like if I was afforded this opportunity, if I'm not taking these Hail Marys as well, it's just not giving it the service that it deserves.
Rajiv Parikh:That's amazing, like I think. A lot of this, at least for me too. I saw my parents take these risks. My dad will say I came to America with a negative $1,100 in my pocket. Wow, negative $1,100. In 1960, I took loans from various relatives who were gonna collect and he came to the US and went to Oklahoma State. He actually could have gone to Berkeley.
Rajiv Parikh:He didn't know the difference just went to Oklahoma State and they just went out. They came out of nowhere. They didn't. They're vegetarian, they didn't know what cheeseburgers were tried ones Like holy shit, I had a cheeseburger right, or eggs, all this stuff, and they just made their way with not a lot of support, and so that's inspiring.
Rishi Mallik:It is inspiring, yeah, and it's. For them it was sustenance right, and for some of us it's not, and so it really you gotta reach deep to be able to throw yourself through the ringer. But you know, like again, it was one of those things where you don't have many chances at it, so why not? And if they could do it with much less, then there's no reason.
Sandeep Parikh:It's infinite room to go. Yeah, amazing, Awesome. All right, hey, Rishi, we prepared a little game for you.
Rishi Mallik:I can see the tickle. I can see the tickle. We must have games.
Sandeep Parikh:So we found some quotes that sort of pertain to stuff that we're talking about and we want you to guess who the folks are that delivered the quote. See if you can figure out who it is. Are you ready?
Rishi Mallik:Yes.
Rajiv Parikh:Are you nervous? Okay, if you screw up, we're definitely gonna play it.
Rishi Mallik:The problem is gonna be somebody that I actually know and I get it wrong. It's me.
Sandeep Parikh:It'll be great for socials, so don't worry about it, it'll be perfect. So here we go. Here's your first quote. There are countless unpredictable forces that can influence the success of an idea, and the only way to know whether one actually works is by testing it.
Rishi Mallik:That sounds like something I would say.
Sandeep Parikh:Is that your final answer? Yes, yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:Congratulations.
Rishi Mallik:Good job. Trick question. Trick question. Trick question. Trick question. Trick question Excellent, excellent, we love that quote. I didn't know I sounded that official, it's a strong one.
Sandeep Parikh:Let's see if we can get this next one. All right, You're not always going to hit the nail on the head the first time around. This one's counter to what we've been trying to do in academia. Now, if you were listening closely, you might have heard that from this podcast. Who do you think said that? That's me.
Rishi Mallik:Oh, wow.
Rajiv Parikh:Okay, two for two. One is just for two. Wow, I can't believe it. Unbelievable, he's so quotable, unbelievable To himself. Here's a third one.
Sandeep Parikh:Okay, a common mistake is thinking that pouring more into the top of the funnel is the only way to increase the final output. It's often much more effective to optimize steps in a funnel versus adding more at the top.
Rishi Mallik:Do I sound that efficient?
Rajiv Parikh:Funalicious.
Rishi Mallik:He's so funnel-all.
Rajiv Parikh:He sounds boring sometimes oh man.
Sandeep Parikh:No, these are great.
Rajiv Parikh:Is that a date line of yours?
Sandeep Parikh:That's your pickup line. One more Okay, we rise to the challenges, we will meet them, we will be well prepared for them and we'll get through them and we'll emerge on the other side stronger.
Rishi Mallik:That's not me, I'm not sure if it's me, and I should know this one. It sounds very familiar. I'm lost for words on this one.
Sandeep Parikh:I don't know, it's okay. I don't know if he's your friend or not, so I don't want you to get in trouble, but it is another Rishi, it's.
Rajiv Parikh:Rishi, another Rishi who went to Stanford.
Rishi Mallik:My parents were so happy when that happened and then the next day was like hey, that could have been you. You were born in the US, why are you on the president there?
Rajiv Parikh:you go. I mean, you didn't become a doctor, at least you could become prime minister, exactly.
Sandeep Parikh:All right, not bad. You got three out of four. You know, listen, a little bit of failure, right? You can't hit the nail on the head in the first time around. You can't get every Rishi right. You can't get all the Rishis right.
Rajiv Parikh:I was going to do some ancient Rishis. What do you have as?
Sandeep Parikh:your ancient Rishi one.
Rishi Mallik:It was something from the Upanishads oh wow, okay, so this is a way back. It was like when I wake up in the morning arise, wake, stop not tell the girls Rishi, kind of a vibe or two.
Sandeep Parikh:Rishi is like I have sages over time. That's right, that's right.
Rajiv Parikh:That's fantastic yeah.
Sandeep Parikh:Rishis are the sages of all time, apparently.
Rajiv Parikh:Rishis are the foundation of our experience.
Rishi Mallik:My parents did well on that one Okay.
Rajiv Parikh:I have a couple of interesting ones to bring to you. At the Spark of Ages podcast, we are big believers that teamwork is critical to the taking your individual spark to the next level, and so a couple of people that you mentioned like one of them was Bhaskar Roy and Ramu, shankara and Nikolay- Apkarev Okay.
Rajiv Parikh:So Bhaskar mentions it was a pleasure working with him at Quick and Skype and I can't wait to see what he goes on to accomplish next. So what was it like to have such a deep partnership with people like Bhaskar and Nikolay and?
Rishi Mallik:Ramu, it's really nice and Bhaskar and I we currently work close together and we have in the past and it's been really. It's one of those things. First, we compliment each other. We're not the same person, which is a good thing, right, because Bhaskar has this amazing bias towards action. He is a force, not necessarily he's not steamrolling, but he is a force in terms of when a decision is made and to get something over the finish line. It's amazing to see him in action and and I really learned a lot from him in that regard that his bias towards action is is phenomenal. And you know, I brought to table more of a totally different skill set in regards to experimentation and, okay, like bias towards action tempered with experimentation is even more powerful, right, and so we really have a close relationship there. And the nicest thing is that you know, bhaskar and I can be on a call for 30 seconds and being like hey, you're on this, I'm on this, cool and it gets done, right.
Rishi Mallik:Dividing conquer, dividing conquer. There's a lot of faith in both sides that we both don't necessarily need to be in the room, that it's going to happen in the best way possible you can count on each other Right, and I think that's the best thing about that relationship, and not not even just in a work setting. I mean, we've known each other now for over a decade, so even personally, you know we can. There's always that trust on both sides, which is nice.
Rajiv Parikh:So would you give that advice to other budding marketers or budding growth marketers or budding entrepreneurs?
Rishi Mallik:I would say, you know, for not even just in marketing, not even just in growth, I think it's. I think it's good in the growth aspect to have somebody that sort of compliments you right, and it also helps with experimentation in terms of ideation, if you're going down one path, for somebody to give you a totally different perspective. I think in general the thing that I tell people is you know you can be as good as you are at your job, but if people don't want to collaborate with you not that they're okay collaborating with you, but if they actively don't want to collaborate with you, that's going to sort of temper anywhere that you can potentially get. And so I think really like having those relationships are equally, if not more, important than just how good you are at your work.
Rajiv Parikh:At your work, at your job, that's right. Right Now, other than our, our significant difference that you like the Lakers and I like the Warriors and the Celtics See, Dave's got me on that one.
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, I'm a Celtics fan, so, no, I do not have you on that one. I have the opposite of you on that one. I had to throw that in there.
Rajiv Parikh:Other than that point of difference between ourselves, what are you living now, Steeve?
Rishi Mallik:I hear you're in your uh, I'm in your. La. Okay, you got me.
Sandeep Parikh:I'm living here, okay, and actively rooting against every team.
Rajiv Parikh:I must say, though, when we saw the Red Sox beat the Dodgers in the World Series, the fans there we were in game six and suddenly got us the tickets in LA, in LA, it's game five, game five, yeah they wanted to crush them.
Rajiv Parikh:That's right. Yeah, we crushed them when we got in game five and the fans after the Dodgers lost. They weren't like typical fans where they boo them or they just walk out. They stuck around and they partied with us. It was the most the folks in LA were. After that, I rooted for the Dodgers when they went for the World Series because I was like you know why they're that kind. That's just unbelievable. But other than that point of difference, I love all the stuff that you're talking about and I'd say if you were to start something new and say you were at workado and so dedicated to what you're doing, what would it be? If it could be a book, tv show, movie, podcast, video game, money was no object, what would you do?
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, you know, I've thought about this and it's interesting. We talked about the growth mindset and how, you know we talked about in the context of technology, saas, b2b SaaS, but it can be applied anywhere and really taking that approach to industries that, in my opinion, haven't been as disrupted, right. So you think about, for example, the real estate industry a lot of room for disruption. You think about the medical industry there's amazing innovations that are happening, but still a lot of room for disruption. And so, you know, I think there's a couple of ideas that I've been thinking about in that regard, but also a lot of things that we talked about today. I've just been putting on paper in my free time and so now it's turned into this doc that's, you know, 20, 30 pages long, nice, and I don't know where that's going to go, but it'd be interesting to.
Rajiv Parikh:I smell a book deal, Say it could be a podcast deal.
Rishi Mallik:I'm pitching to Mr Hollywood over here, so hopefully I hope something comes out of it With a Ford by Richie.
Rajiv Parikh:With a quote from the Rishis of the ages.
Rishi Mallik:Yeah, every wish you have on time, there we go.
Rajiv Parikh:That's fantastic, fantastic.
Rishi Mallik:You know, there's one other thing that just came to mind, and this has just been something top of mind for me and my team. For any of the go-to-market folk, whether it's technology, whether it's B2B, whether it's retail product, whatever Just market and sell how you would want to be sold to I think the number one tool in our toolkit that people use the least is asking themselves the question of would I go to this event that I'm trying to throw? Would I respond to this email that I'm trying to send?
Rishi Mallik:How would I respond to this message that I'm giving to my customer, my prospect? It's the thing we use the least.
Rishi Mallik:It boggles my mind. I am, you know, at our company, for example, I'm the number one buyer of technology, which is not something to be proud of. But you know, building out the marketing stack like it's a huge thing. You have to do, you have to do, and so I'm dealing with vendors on a day-to-day basis and you know like I haven't read a white paper on any of these technologies before, but the typical B2B sales tactic is to put out white paper down your throat, that's right.
Rishi Mallik:And then that's a real lead. And then enter your email address and then get them. We're going to follow up on that, right? So just let's think about, as marketers, as go to market, and again, it's not just even technology. Let's just think about, like, how we would respond to that. Same thing with events. I'm not going to go to an event where a vendor is going to talk about themselves and their customer stories, right. I'm going to go to an event where my peers are there and I get to talk to folks in that, in that industry, and if they happen to be using an interesting technology or tool, that's going to garner my interest. And if they throw an event like that, that's going to be a favorite.
Rajiv Parikh:Yep, I and you know what. I would say this, and the best part of that advice is what, sundee? Well, what, what was it? I don't know. Can you tell me? It's free. It is free If you just look at it from your own perspective. It's free, and all people like free. So thank you so much, rishi. I thought it was fantastic today. Thank you so much for coming in today. Let's do this again. Yes, let's keep doing these.
Sandeep Parikh:This is great man. Okay, well, last thing before we go head to head Brown versus Stanford who's got the better light bulb?
Rajiv Parikh:Here we go right now, rajeev you get to decide Okay, ready, ready, ready, do we get some music? Let's go. Who could do the better, the best, the best Versus light? We'll add music, don't worry about that. For that, for that, for that, for that, you get the shoulders. And there's the there you go the shoulders. Oh it's a leg action you can't get that but it's a tough contest. I think suddenly practiced more before he got in and he's much more of a performer, so I'm going to give it to Sunday. Sorry, rishi.
Sandeep Parikh:Wow, really, I was going to say Rishi did better with the shoulders.
Rajiv Parikh:But Sunday did better with the turning of the bulb.
Rishi Mallik:So I you know he also had sound effects, which is I'd give them that.
Sandeep Parikh:We'll split it. We'll split it.
Rishi Mallik:It's fine, we'll split it and we'll even go to a.
Rajiv Parikh:We'll even go to a we'll go to a.
Rajiv Parikh:Lakers Warriors game. Let's do it Awesome. Thank you so much. So what'd you think? That was really great? I it was amazing talking to a person that's, just throughout his entire life, has taken chances and done it to make the world a better place, and this is more in the technology realm. But he's gone from consumer to business to business tech, which is, in a way, doing a lot of things in the background that we don't realize, and I think the one thing I would take away from all this is how he embraces the notion of failure and turns it into an asset. My favorite point was how he in college, would just join up a whole bunch of startups and yeah, that's nuts.
Rajiv Parikh:Did it matter, like he just joined them and they would fail and they'd flop. And he then combined that with what he did at Stanford to turn it into the science of experimentation. He called it the rule of nine.
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, very cool, very cool. I was mostly just doing improv in college, so that's.
Rajiv Parikh:Well, you were doing your own form of failure.
Sandeep Parikh:That's true, that's true, yeah, oh, it was definitely getting in front of audiences and just throwing yourself out there, definitely feeling.
Sandeep Parikh:I think my takeaway, you know, was how he was so inspired by family, ultimately, like sort of finding out that his spark was from this, just this desire to connect with his mom and connect with his culture and his food. And and then I think, that theme of family we didn't it didn't hit it over the head with it, but ultimately it was like in that whole, like, oh, finding your own busker, finding your own counterparts, like finding your own family in whatever you do, because you need that team in order to succeed as well. And so, I don't know, I feel like that was.
Rajiv Parikh:I'd say he integrates all that. Yeah, he integrates that so well with the way he lives.
Sandeep Parikh:Yeah, it's just really amazing. I'm going to work on that Great inspiration.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple podcasts, google podcasts, everywhere podcasts can be found, all right.
Sandeep Parikh:The show is produced by me, sunday Perique and Anand Shah production assistants by Taryn Talley. Edited by Sean Mayer.
Rajiv Parikh:And I'm your host, rajiv Perique from Physician Squared, a leading growth marketing company based in Santa Clara, california, silicon Valley, come visit us at position2.com. This has been an effing funny production. We'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious.