Founders in CX: Why Culture and Customer Experience Start at the Top

If the culture is bad, it’s on you.

If the product isn’t good, it’s on you.

— Pat Osorio, Co-Founder, Birdie AI

What does it really take to build a company that puts customers at the center — not just in words, but in every decision?

In this all-female Founders edition of CX Roundtable, host Sarah Caminiti brings together three powerhouse women redefining how customer experience is built, scaled, and led:

• Pat Osorio, Co-Founder of Birdie AI
• Nivedha Venkatesh, Founder & CEO of Pageloop
• Emma Roffey, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Trusted

Together, they open up about the realities of being a founder in CX — the weight of culture, the speed of growth, and the intentionality required to build something that lasts.

You’ll hear:

• Why founders — not CX teams — shape how customers are treated
• How to embed customer experience into your company’s DNA from day one
• What happens when women lead with empathy and strategy
• The mental load of building something that actually cares
• And the reminder that “if the culture is bad, it’s on you.”

This is more than a conversation about CX — it’s a masterclass in leadership, trust, and what it means to build with purpose.

🎧 Hosted by: Sarah Caminiti, Retention Strategist and Founder of the RVA Framework

📅 Release date: November 11, 2025

🔗 Follow CX Roundtable for honest, actionable conversations about leadership, retention, and the future of customer experience.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to CX Roundtable
• 0:36 Founders Unique Perspective on CX
• 6:34 The Importance of Embedding CX Into Founding Team
• 12:39 Balancing Customer Experience with Product Development
• 24:04 Building Trust and Advocacy in Customer Relationships
• 25:58 Innovating At Speed in Large Organizations
• 28:20 Building Strong Foundations for Customer Experience
• 31:33 Listening to Customers: The Key to Success
• 34:55 Evolving Roles and Responsibilities in CX
• 41:33 Scaling with Integrity and Customer Focus
• 46:19 Shared Mental Load in Customer Experience
• 52:17 The Power of Small Gestures in CX
• 56:48 The Journey of Being a Founder

Transcript

Sarah Caminiti 

Welcome to the CX Roundtable. This is a really cool episode because not only is this an episode of Founders, it is an episode of all female founders. And I think that that is something to celebrate right here that these three incredible women decided to take time out of their day to hang out and talk about what they know, what they've learned, ask each other questions, answer a bunch of questions and make it so that

The idea of a founder isn't foreign. And you understand the thought process behind a lot of things that are going on in a founder's mind when they're making decisions and also how they think about CX from those early stages to a little bit later in the game. And all three of these founders did not start their career as a founder. They have built careers in other spaces. And I'm really excited to learn how that's influenced.

their time as a founder and how they think about the customer because of it. So welcome. I'm so happy that you're here. I'm Sarah Caminiti and I'm going to let this crew introduce themselves. I'm going to start with you, Pat, if you would like to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Pat Osorio (09:56.353)

All right. Thank you for having me, Sarah. Great pleasure to be here with you and these other founders in CX. So Pedro Zorio, co-founder of Birdie AI. Birdie is a company that helps our clients better understand their customers. We believe that there are millions of signals out there that companies are missing about what their customers like, dislike, and Birdie helps our clients build a program and build a process where all the signals are translated into actions that we

improve customer experience pretty much. So that's us.

Sarah Caminiti (10:29.353)

Yes, it's a really great tool, really, really great tool. Next, I am going to pick on you, Niv, someone that I have known for many, many years, and I'm so, happy that you're here.

Nivedha Venkatesh (10:41.866)

Yeah, it's such a pleasure, Sarah. Thank you so much for inviting me. And it's very special to be among all of you women founders in CX. I've basically been in CX, I'd say, for 10 years as a front line, and I started as a front line support agent, led teams, built my technical skills, and really thoroughly enjoyed my journey there. And I think what

when Chad GPT came out, I was like, wow, this is super cool. This might be such a beautiful time to start something. And I picked a very, very deep personal pain that not just me, but every single team member I've worked with has gone through, which is keeping your help talks updated. And it just got worse with AI coming in, in a way, where you're using AI in customer support, you're using AI in sales enablements, and literally every possible

direction and product is shipping super fast and very rapidly so I built page loop.ai to help really fast moving product teams to keep their documentation updated and it's something that I'm super super passionate about and yeah I'm very excited to be here and chat with all of you thank you for having me

Sarah Caminiti (12:02.645)

Amazing. Yes. Thank you so much. And Emma, I am so excited to introduce you as well.

Emma Roffey (12:08.674)

Thank you. Yeah. So Emma Roffey, I am now, because it's recently changed, in April, one of the founders and co-CEO of a brand new company and we're building trust led growth in the industry and building a new trust led growth engine. And this is my first podcast. So what a pleasure to be with the founder, not ever, but as CEO of, a co-CEO of Trusted.

So yeah, really excited to join you all today.

Sarah Caminiti (12:42.677)

that's so cool. And what a great like topic for it to be your first time coming onto a podcast as a founder, having it be all about the founder journey. And so thanks for trusting me with that.

Emma Roffey (12:56.334)

I spent years at Cisco, many years, so coming from corporate, so quite a transition. I'm often asked about that transition. How did you go from there to this? But yeah, long time in there. So running global customer advocacy for 10 years and also VP of marketing at Cisco. So a lot of experience in the area, not so much CX in this true way, but certainly have a

strong viewpoint on that.

Sarah Caminiti (13:28.725)

Yeah, for sure. I think that's what makes this group so wonderful. You're not just coming in through a singular lens. You are all solving problems about the customer and about how can you better the relationships within the companies to better the customer experience. And that is CX at its core. And your times at other companies and in other roles

you felt pain because of the customer not being heard, the customer not having the updated materials that they need, the team not having the updated materials that they need, the trust factor of everything that is kind of at the foundation of both customer and employee experience, and you're trying to solve it. So it doesn't really matter at the end of the day where your background is. You felt a pain that directly impacts the customer and

You're trying to make something that that improves that space and that's that's really important. We need that.

So let me dive into the first question that I'm gonna throw your way. And Pat, I'm gonna ask you this, especially because of the type of company that you have built. And do you think a company can truly be customer first without having CX embedded in its founding team?

Pat Osorio (15:00.108)

Yeah, that's a hard one. I personally believe that you don't unless the founding team brings somebody and gives all the authority to this person. So a blank slate for this person to embed CX in the process. So even in our case, what prompted us to start Birdie was we are those customers that never felt heard, that felt that, people

companies send me like service I answer to the service they go nowhere

I submit a ticket to support, it goes nowhere. And then companies want you to research, they want to invest a lot of money, but why? I'm here screaming what I want, what I'm feeling the pain, it's a pain and everything, and companies are not using it. So a lot of, I think it's easy to say you are customer-centric because everybody wants to say they are customer-centric, but being customer-centric is much more like then building a CX team is embedding CX as the core of the organization and make

sure that the voice of customer is used to drive strategic decisions in products, strategic decisions in processes, in sales, in marketing and everything. going back to your question, I think it's very hard for a company. And actually, when I go to events or talk to people, a lot of the complaints from CX teams,

is exactly that, I'm not hurt or I don't have a seat in the table. You probably heard this a lot of time, like I don't have a seat in the table, I'm not hurt, I'm seen as a cost center. So if the founders or the exact team, depending on the size of the company, don't truly believe that customer centricity is a driver of growth and it's going to help them move to the next level and see that as strategic, it's very unlikely that customer experience

Pat Osorio (16:54.314)

really be done the right way. So unfortunately it needs to be there since the beginning.

Sarah Caminiti (17:01.993)

Yeah, yeah, I think that you just basically explained the root problem so many companies face right there and it's that CX is the core of every single thing that needs to happen with the company and not making it the core is a choice. It is a conscious choice whether they want to believe it, admit it or not. You can have as many customer words on your website as you want, but

If the customer is not thought of in every single business decision that you make and the experience that they have is not thought of in every single business decision that you make, then you are none of those things that are on your website. it is something I think that you do have to have at the beginning because that sends such a message to everybody that this has to happen.

Emma Roffey (17:55.459)

Yeah.

I think another way of looking at it is when you start, you're doing all roles. You're trying to go as fast as possible.

There's many things you can outsource. You can outsource marketing. You can outsource sales. You cannot outsource customer experience. Customer support is not a bolt on. If it's seen as that cost center, then it's not part of your strategy. Customers feel that. So this is not something that can be outsourced and it's got to be within your DNA from the get go.

Sarah Caminiti (18:38.409)

Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. And I think that that is a little bit of a double edged sword though, because the struggle that I see with a lot of the narratives surrounding companies foundations are anybody can do customer support. So I can do it. I can have the marketing guy do it on Tuesdays. it's not that they're not getting value out of it, but...

That's not who they are. They don't understand what good looks like in the real sense. They don't understand what the right questions are to ask and how to obtain the data that you actually want to obtain. There's so much strategy and thought that goes into building a CX function the right way that the founder has to have that as part of their DNA. I 1,000 % agree.

in the same way that they have to understand that it's okay if that's not their background and you have to have a background in this to do this well. You at least need to have people that you can bring in as advisors to check your work and make sure that you're doing it right because as your plate gets more full, as your company starts to scale and grow and even just go through speed bumps, this thing

that everybody can do that doesn't take any skill is going to just keep falling lower and lower and lower on your priority list. Cause you tell yourself, I'll just hop on at 11 o'clock at night and bang out like 50 emails. It'll take me like 15 minutes. It doesn't take any thought at all. No big deal. And then you start getting into that habit. And then your mindset shifts from, this is a really important driver for a business to this is an afterthought.

and so yeah, I mean, I completely agree with what you're saying, Emma. It has to be a part of your soul to want to do it the right way, but you have to have an expert do it the right way. and Niv as someone who is an expert, what is it like being a founder and wearing the hat of the founder while also knowing that CX has to be handled so foundationally well from the very beginning.

Nivedha Venkatesh (21:03.006)

Yeah, honestly, you know, after I started this new role of a founder, I keep questioning myself how much I truly understand about CX because every time, every day, I discover something that I could have done better. So I think it's been such a journey. A couple of things that, you know, I've...

noticed myself doing quite naturally that when I see my other co-founders or my engineers, so by the way all of them are supposed to do support in a way that even if you do it terribly, it's alright.

I had someone on my team, I think yesterday, explain a technical issue in the most technical way possible. And I said, it's okay. And at the same time, that's how we learn and that's how we set the culture. All of us need to have our Slack notifications on for every single message that comes through every single customer channel. I don't care if you've muted some of our internal channels, that's fine.

call you but if there's a customer channel that you're on, the notifications have to be on by default. That's a mandate. Now, I think a few things that I've also noticed is my sales tactics are...

very supportive. Like, I don't know what it's actually like to do sales because I've spent all my career in CX. So even when I talk to customers, I think I deeply empathize. I ask them questions that sort of show them that I also have lived the pain. And I think those are things that you experience as a CX person when you're sitting on the front lines. And I think...

Nivedha Venkatesh (22:53.704)

The hardest part right now for me, and the answer with this is balancing CX with long-term product. So I've now started to learn the nuance of

hearing customers talk about problems, but having to come up with solutions yourselves because customers also love to give you solutions. But at the same time, you have a much, much broader view of what's the vision that you want to build with this product that you're or this company that you're running. So I think that's a nuance that I'm just starting to learn and it's a hard one.

Emma Roffey (23:35.256)

Can I just build on that, because that's just hurt. So when I think of customer sex, so I started in sales, hardcore, telly sales for many years, field sales, you name it. But when a customer spoke or a prospect spoke, whatever you want to call them, you listened and you acted immediately. Otherwise you were going to lose that sale. Then I transitioned over into marketing.

and I couldn't understand, and I still don't, the pace of response sometimes versus, so I'm like, why aren't we dealing with that customer now? They said they need help or they're giving us this feedback and it's like, well, yeah, we'll get to it. Not in our business now, but this is over the years. And I'm like, why aren't people responding like a salesperson? So it's funny you sort of said,

on the other side because you are listening to new question. And I think now, know, passionate about customer experience, I think actually starting in sales has helped me with that because of that responsiveness and that listening and that acting on the signals that they are giving you.

So I find it really frustrating when I've worked in other organisations. I'm why are we jumping on this? Why is no one responding so quickly? The customer has spoken. We should listen. We should act. And that pace has always surprised me. I thought, well, maybe it's not background in sales, but that's what I expect, that pace to respond. it was just interesting you said that.

Sarah Caminiti (25:13.299)

I think that's such a cool point though, Emma, about the, you get to see what happens when you listen because you close a deal and you get to see how powerful it is to make that customer feel like they're the only customer that matters and that you're going to go and jump through hoops for them, regardless of how much, you know, you're going to be making off of it.

but a customer or a prospect is a prospect and you want to be successful. And I don't know if all salespeople approach it that way of, you know, I want to solve this problem. I want to solve this problem so I can close the deal. It's, I mean, I don't know what other way that you would think about it because I'm a CX person and that's just how my brain is. But I mean, I don't see that every day of people wanting to actually solve the problem for the person.

Emma Roffey (26:05.39)

It is that, but it's also once you've made the sale, want the customer to be happy after their purchase.

And I think you then dread it if they're not, it's like, oh, it's sort of disappointing for the sale. it's, is this, yes, you want my cuspid, then you want them to be happy to continue. And obviously there's upsell, expansion, repeat, et cetera. But, but I always remember feeling they've made that decision and now I want them happy. next time I speak to them, whether it's account management, I want them to be happy. I don't, you know, so again, you're constantly listening. it's, yeah.

Sarah Caminiti (26:43.177)

Yeah, no, I mean, it makes total sense. makes, of course, you want to have that same white glove experience that you experience when you're in the sales process throughout the whole time. And I think that that's a lot of what you're trying to do at Birdie Pat is make sure that those things that come up in sales that someone wants to solve for them to close the deal and then have them continue to enjoy the product, like, are we still listening to them? And how has that?

being a founder and listening to your customers, but also building a tool that is made so that they can listen to their customers. How has that been? How have you navigated that?

Pat Osorio (27:25.794)

Yeah, no, that's pretty interesting. One of the things we discussed prior was what is the one thing in CX there's still a problem for your company. And in our case, we're so driven by the voice of our customers and we are hustlers and we deliver things fast that sometimes we just listen to the customer. We want to deliver that quickly and we deliver, but we don't think about the experience

as a whole and sometimes like our product got to a point where we have so many features that are coming as requests.

that the experience is starting to be like overwhelming for some. So like, how can we make sure that we're listening to the customers and delivering, but also making sure that when we deliver, we deliver the full experience. And I was listening to all of you and there was a recent study by Sturdy that was saying that the two highest causes of churn are customer experience and product. And if you think a lot of people, they think of customer experience, they are thinking only about support.

or about the extended support, but customer experience for me, the product is part of the experience, right? Like the sales is part of the experience. That's actually the third highest cause of churn is over promises in sales. So we're pretty much talking about like the whole conversation here. And for me, that's all part of customer experience. The way I'm selling and what I'm promising to you and what I'm making sure that I understand being your problem to the way that I

Sarah Caminiti (28:41.493)

Yeah.

Pat Osorio (29:05.246)

set the platform for you to the way that I deliver this promise to you in support and in the product and so on. So that's very challenging. think for us, the main thing is we listen to the customers. We are transparent with them. We make sure to tell them like what's happening, how we're prioritizing things. We make sure to show them that we're listening, not necessarily we're executing in the speed that they want or like the way that they want. We need to tell no sometimes too because they want something as Niv was saying. Sometimes they

have a very strong opinion about something but that's not the solution or the best way of solving their problem.

But yeah, for me it's almost like it's a dream life because I'm building a company that delivers what I believe like the most, which is I'm helping companies better understand their customers and I'm making sure that I do this in my company as well. So of course it's not easy, but it's pretty much like, let's do in the house, let's do internally what we tell our customers to do. So we have a strong VSOF customer program. We are not our ICP. We are an enterprise customer.

and we sell to more B2C direct to consumer customers, but still we use Birdie. So our feedback is fed into Birdie. We use it to understand what are the top requests, what are the top complaints. We have a monthly voice of customer meeting where we bring all those requests and prioritize and send it back to customers. So it's pretty cool to use the tool and to see companies using the tool and seeing everything like aligning.

Sarah Caminiti (30:39.445)

I mean, that's the that's the dream though really to have a tool that actually makes sense for you to use for your business to be successful and then at the same time when you push a rollout when you release a product you're gonna feel those those pains if it was an MVP and And it wasn't done fully and you you told yourself. All right, we're just gonna push this out and

We'll give it a few months and then we'll find time to actually go all the way. You get to feel what the reality of that MVP is, which is something that I think a lot of founders, at least in my experience and the experience of others that I've spoken to, that's a really hard one because you are excited about things, you wanna push things, you wanna move fast, you wanna deliver, you wanna have more to talk about, but at the same time,

through that you lose intentionality and you lose your footing because you just start building tech debt and half-made solutions to things that you maybe didn't take the time to really understand the pain point you were trying to solve for because, oh, that sounds really cool. I think that might be connected to this thing. Let's go, let's go. I mean, I'm not a founder. I don't know if that's how the conversations go, but in my mind, that is how it probably goes.

but you get to feel it. And through that, not only are you able to make better choices, but you're also in a position where you can educate companies on the impact of those choices because of the type of company that you're building. And I think with the three of you, you're building companies that can also be used to educate companies as to what good looks like. And...

That's really special. And I think that that's a selfless thing that you're providing to the CX community, especially because your pain is then translated to a better process, to a better product, to just a better experience. And then you can use that to be vulnerable and be honest and be like, this is what happens. This is why this matters. This is what we thought we could do and we couldn't.

Sarah Caminiti (33:00.989)

And now we need to rethink these things because of what we've learned. And Emma, I would love to know from your experience being in a corporate setting for so long where things are very slow and there's a lot of red tape and there's 30 million people that have to think about things before you even change a period on a doc. What is it like now being someone that's absorbing all of this information?

and then being able to move.

Emma Roffey (33:35.662)

Yeah, and still not be fast enough as we want to. We want to sprint is the word we're saying. We want to sprint, but we're at the stage where we're building their foundation. So we're not running before we can walk, we're not sprinting before we can walk. But actually to the point that Pat made, we actually are going to be one of our own first customers as well. So we can live and breathe that because for us, trust, advocacy is probably the term people use, but I want to broaden

Sarah Caminiti (33:38.429)

you

Emma Roffey (34:05.616)

We're not just building another advocacy tool. This is a trust led growth platform due to the changes in the buying behavior and our trust of peers, more than salespeople, the shift in the buying process and want to speak to their peers. So what we found already, even though we're starting in April, we already have a net...

who are speaking in communities and everything on our behalf. So we want to use our platform where we can have those and we will directly experience that and we'll probably push our own developer team even more so. To answer your question on that on speed, even though we're large organisations, they don't always move slowly.

If you have the freedom to innovate, and I say freedom, if you have the freedom to innovate, the freedom to pilot, you can get away from speed if you pilot things and that's where we can go faster. So, you know, in some respects, I just, wish I did have the infrastructure already and the teams, it's like, we could get that team to do, we could get this. So it's a hard thing where as I say, we're holding back.

to everything we want to do. And I just wish we had the product out now and not next April. But I think what I have learned from corporate is the importance of the rigour.

and the process and the strong foundations and doing things really professionally. And I think that's what I would take and I want to apply. And for our ICP is enterprise. And I've deliberately done that. We're going for the complexity first, because if we can build and be enterprise ready and back to an earlier point in our little bit of the industry, it's not going to be so little.

Emma Roffey (35:59.744)

but it's growing but there is a tendency of over promising and under delivering and I hate that I absolutely hate that and yes as a salesperson it's very easy to say yes we can do this yes we can do this and yes this is ready but I know that's not going to help the customer experience and

is that in this industry, stories move fast, CX spreads. So it's got to be done with that rigor and that process. So despite wanting to sprint, we are walking. And so I need to get myself there. But that is right, because I will take that corporate professionalism, the structure, the foundation to what we are building now to be enterprise ready.

I hope that answers the question.

Sarah Caminiti (36:50.633)

Yes, no, I think that that does and that it I mean all of the things that you three have brought up my my brain is just spinning with all of these things that I want to learn about and our poor document is definitely going to be neglected today. But but no Emma, I think that that's a really cool point and I think it goes back to the intentionality. It's when you're building a foundation, not only are you creating a solid

footing for your company to be able to move forward without having to constantly move backwards and fix all of these cracks that are in the foundation that show themselves. But also you're showing your team, all of your employees, that this is how we function. This is how we think. This is how we strategize. This is how we communicate, handle difficult conversations. All of that happens when you're building a foundation. If you do it

Thoughtfully and purposefully and intentionally and then it also from the very very beginning you are showing the customer that your actions speak louder than your words and And I think that that is a piece that a lot of a lot of companies miss because they're so excited Because they they think that they've they've got it enough and and they'll figure it out later and You're right with CX word travels fast

and the differentiators are the actual human connection. It is that customer experience that will make someone stay. Even if things get a little muddy, if they feel seen, respected, valued, heard, they'll let things go. But if they don't feel all of those things from the very beginning, the second you have a hiccup,

you have another browser tab open and you're googling alternatives and you're setting up calls.

Emma Roffey (38:51.992)

And this is what we call the growth leak. Because quite often what's happening is that it is invisible. Trust is invisible. And part of our job is to make that more visible because your customers will speak. They will influence. They are in communities. They're doing all this. But quite often as an organization, that is totally invisible to you.

Sarah Caminiti (39:00.085)

Mm-hmm.

Emma Roffey (39:14.604)

and that is where your leak is. So it's hiding in plain sight and we have to make those trust signals far more visible for you.

Sarah Caminiti (39:26.111)

Yeah, well, it's so important and it can be overwhelming, very, very overwhelming to think of all of the nooks and crannies that these things can live and then they prove that they're there and they made an impact, whether good or bad. Niv, I'm curious, since you've built this company and you understand the power of a positive customer experience and the way that community can influence...

the success of a business. I know that for at least a year you have been on a listening tour and wanting to learn from others that are in this space. And how do you think that that has helped shape what's gonna be the takeaway for the customer? Because you have all of this proof that people are feeling this, but sometimes that's hard to translate to the actual.

thing the customer feels.

Nivedha Venkatesh (40:28.254)

Yeah, it's almost like there are problems and there are problems people would pay for. Now for you to actually build a good business, you have to find problems that people would pay for. And I think my year-long journey of just interviewing, I don't know, over 200 CX leaders at this point was all about understanding that prioritization that they have in their mind.

There was a lot of reading in between the lines. And for me to build conviction that this is something that I will spend the next decade of my life doing. And for that to happen, I think those chats, you were also one of those, multiple times, in fact. Very grateful for that community to sort of come together. think just want to quickly shout out

Sarah Caminiti (41:17.939)

loved it.

Nivedha Venkatesh (41:27.032)

support driven. I think as a community it's been phenomenal to help you know other CX leaders and founders like myself to understand the problems deeper. What I also realized is there is a lot hiding in plain sight you don't actually have to go talk to people all the time you just have to pay attention to what you're reading and seeing and the emotions even the react G's people post on add to a slack message you can clearly tell from that.

that there is something that they feel. And I think just adding to what Emma said on trust, I think the whole foundation of what I'm also building is from that.

as soon as AI hit the market, the first function that got affected was support. And not in the best way, you know, like people were like, my God, support was already like so hard and now I have to interact with the chat bot. And it really broke my heart, like in the truest sense to see a community and a function like support that has always, you know,

was bearing the brunt of all the mishaps of either things happening outside the company or inside the company. And to see that function being affected the most at the very beginning, think that...

I think that drove me even further to talk to CX leaders to understand like how are you really feeling about all this? Like what, is your mind at? Like, know, people at the top, the execs are telling you to cut costs more and more. And you know that it's already a suffering function in terms of giving great customer experience. So I think...

Nivedha Venkatesh (43:13.532)

nothing more powerful than listening but also sprinkling in a little bit of would you pay for that. So important but yeah I'm still on that journey we'll see how that goes.

Sarah Caminiti (43:28.009)

I mean, what you're doing is something that is a pain and that usually is a head on the team to have to manage it to do it the right way. so while I'm never a supporter of reducing head count within support, I think you always need to have a little bit of more than you need in support at all times. But this is bringing time back.

to them, stressful time, overwhelming time back to them and could potentially bridge some gaps with product because you're able to flag, hey, these updates happened. You didn't tell us about them. Thankfully, the docs got updated because we have the system set up. But we've got to fix this plan, this strategy, because we've got to be in the loop.

without a tool flagging those things, you're usually so far in the weeds that you acknowledge it, you're angry for 30 seconds, and then you've got a fire to put out. then you're reminded of it two weeks later when the same exact thing happens. And so now you have it documented. And that's a gift to have it actually taken care of. That's off your plate to have to be monitoring and documenting and tracking all of those things. have

something that is actually paying attention to this and you're able to be like, I didn't know about that. I knew this was coming or, you missed one. Let's make sure that we check all those boxes next time. So, I mean, I would pay for it. So I think a lot of people would. Pat, I'm really curious about your roles evolution because we're talking a lot about...

the very, very beginning and what we're thinking about in the very, very beginning. But you are a founder with a company that has been successful and has has stuck around and scaled. And I'm sure that your role has evolved greatly since the very, very beginning, probably in great ways and also ways that you wish you could clone yourself. But but how has it changed for you?

Pat Osorio (45:49.656)

Yeah.

No, it definitely has changed. I think the beginning when Niv was sharing her experience, it brought me back to a few years ago where we were doing the same process of talking to customers and trying to understand if the pain that we were planning on solving was a pain. I can share it later with you, our experience with Niv, but I think the hardest part was exactly understanding, okay, is it a pain that is big enough for you to pay, and not only for you to pay, but for you to prioritize?

like among five.

10 different types of pain that you have. So that's probably the hardest part. So I think in the beginning was, and the nice thing if you go back to it, it's again listening, right? And talking to the customer and looking at what the customer, like not only listening literally, but also like paying attention to what they're doing, where is their pain point, what is the friction point. So it started a lot with that. And I think until today, like the one thing that never changed was how can we keep listening to the customers and understanding

understanding what they want or what we need to give them so they can better execute their roles and this better aligns with what we envision for Birdie and for CX as a whole. And I agree a lot with what you both were saying. I think CX is the most beautiful thing in companies. Even though I'm like a salesperson, I think our success in selling is because we're not like traditional salespeople. We are like selling something we believe in. We're selling

Pat Osorio (47:25.096)

a solution to the problem that we know that we can help. So that's the one thing that definitely didn't change. And I think what changed it, and I think as you grow, one thing you need to learn, and that's the same thing, and not only as a founder, but also as a leader in different roles, you need to let go and know that people will do things in a different way than you do exactly. So you need to know that, I would do this exact same way, but, okay, this is your way as long as

we're getting to the same goal as long as we... So that's one of the hardest exercises we did. think also not being in the front line with the customer anymore. So until one year ago, two years ago, probably I was like personally talking to every customers. Now I'm not anymore. So that's strange for us because we love to be with the customer. So that's also changing. But how can I make sure that, the culture is there and my CX person, my customer success person, my product person, they all have.

this mindset of like, my customer is the most important thing for us and I want them to have a good experience. I want them to feel heard and you can do it in your own way as long as that is there. So that's a lot of like shift that we needed to do. It's painful sometimes to see and good and painful at the same time. So sometimes like maybe three, four years ago, if the platform was down, nobody would even notice because we didn't have enough clients.

or clients who are not using it. Now it's like, as soon as we have a small glitch, we started receiving messages and we're like, that's great. People are using it and they are feeling the pain, but at the same time that sucks because we don't want that to happen. that's also changing. We're starting to see numbers and so on. that's probably one of the main changes. And I think now our challenge is...

So I would say like we had this first phase of product market feed, figuring out what the product was going to be. Now we got early growth. So we are already 30, 40 customers, good revenue, a lot of retention. But now how do I, we almost six X'd this year, but now we want a three X, we want a four X next year. But how do I do that keeping our...

Pat Osorio (49:46.627)

core values and keeping the quality we delivered so far. I think that's the main, the one thing that keeps me from sleeping well sometimes.

Sarah Caminiti (49:58.634)

And that's a fair thing because that's that's a lot to put on your shoulders and to continue to think about and to do it, you know, wanting to do it the right way and continue to to do it the right way and to prove to your customers that doesn't matter how big we get the the company that you fell in love with when there weren't, you know, there wasn't a massive team that's still this company. We're going to make sure that that stays intact.

And I'm not gonna call on anyone in particular for this next question So putting you all on the spot. I'm really curious about how I mean Pat you you've already established your your teams and your structure but for for Nevin for Emma you're still planning probably a lot of your your staffing needs like

since you are all thinking about the customer all the time and that is something that you're also selling all the time that that it's important to think about your customer how are you going to approach staffing your cx teams in a way that isn't like what we see most of the time where it is scrappy and you wear a million hats and you're overwhelmed and burnt out how is your approach going to be different

Pat Osorio (51:20.128)

Yeah, I can start like, yeah, I can share what we're trying to do. So we made some like definitions that we're trying to use. So first everybody in our customer success team. So we're also more enterprise. So we have like higher touch relationships and stuff. So everybody in our CS team didn't come from CS, they came from CX. So they are customer experience people who being in voice of customer roles, who being in CX role, quality role. So they were on the other side before coming.

into birdies so like immediately they understand the pain and they treat the clients differently so that was one of the things that we tested. By the way our salespeople too, so most of our salespeople they are not like seasoned salespeople they were in CX and we brought them and we trained on selling because

Sarah Caminiti (52:07.733)

was hard.

Pat Osorio (52:08.61)

they all have customer centricity and that infused in them. So that was something that we did at least so at least for now. I think one challenge will be like, how can I find those people as we grow and how can we train those people as we grow? But it's still something that we're we're putting there as well. This is a criteria that we want to make sure that we keep for the longest we can, because that's that helps the culture that helps like the rapport with customer that helps with improving the product with a lot of things. The other thing is exactly making sure that product and customer experience are very, very,

close. it's not only the voice of customer meetings and etc. But like our product team is like literally I think they've mentioned you have this like channeling and you can't unmute anything customer related like

anything that comes from the customer is high priority for everybody in the organization. So we all stop to look at it and understand. Again, as we grow, how can we make that in a structured way? But I think the mindset of like, if it's a customer problem, it's a product problem, it's a CS problem, it's everybody's problem, is something that we defined as something that is non-negotiable for us.

And in terms of making sure that they don't get overwhelmed, maybe to that second part of the question. Again, I think it goes back to if...

we see CX as an isolated part of the company and they are the ones, they are the front line, so they are the ones that are receiving the inbound complaints, requests, all the hate is going to them and if it sticks with them, it's too much. Like if you feel that you're alone, so I'm receiving a pay and I'm sharing with product, I'm sharing with sales, I'm sharing with anybody and I don't feel heard and I don't feel that they are trying to help me, that's where I think it starts to be a burden because I think problems will happen

Sarah Caminiti (54:01.024)

Thank you.

Pat Osorio (54:02.152)

I think a lot of work will happen. So as long as you feel that, I'm not the only one that is fighting for the clients, for the problem solving in this organization. I have like a whole team behind me and helping me.

helps everybody in the company, especially CS and CX, feel that, I can do this. The problem came, it can be a big problem, but we're solving this together and it's not going to be only on me. I believe that with those three things, we have built so far something that's working and hopefully we'll be able to scale that in the next few years.

Sarah Caminiti (54:42.047)

Yeah, I'm loving it.

Emma Roffey (54:42.766)

don't know how you parted that path, yeah. Because that gives you, if you said you'd have salespeople that weren't salespeople, you had CX, you weren't CX. And I love that because when it is founders, then you're doing all roles. Whether you've got experience or not, you learn fast. But I think to answer your question, Sarah, now having thought about expansion and the people I'm sort of employing, yes, I've had experience with them sometimes, but it's a mindset first.

And if they've got the right mindset for this, having that customer centricity, putting the customer first, the customer voice louder than ours, that's a mindset. And I will employ, or we will employ people who have that mindset. And I love the fact that Pat, that gives us sort of...

Yeah, not the freedom, but the permission. People in roles that have never had that before, yeah.

Sarah Caminiti (55:37.321)

The proof. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, this makes me so excited for the future because like that is it. It is we're hiring right now. And for the first time, I'm not pushing to hire super technical people. I'm looking for culture fits because you can train anybody. But if their values aren't aligned, if their approach to work is not aligned, then you can't teach that. That's just kind of a part.

Who they are and they will thrive in other companies that match the way that they work and the way that they think But it doesn't mean that we have to make it work here and and I also I really love the way that you you talked about Pat the that that shared mental load Because I mean also like just as a woman in general just stereotypically. I mean we

We carry the mental load all the time and it is invisible and it is heavy and it is lonely and it's really hard to always be able to pull yourself out and be like, these are all the things that you can take off my plate that you should have seen needed to be taken off my plate but for some reason you did not choose to do so. That takes time and that takes energy and that takes more brain power that you probably are lacking and so

having it be in the culture of you're not alone. You don't have to carry all of this sadness and anger and negativity when things go south. And you also aren't gonna be alone and shouting about all of the wins from the customers either. It goes both ways because that is our culture. And our culture is we do this together because CX is connected to.

Sarah Caminiti (57:33.915)

everything and Niv you were nodding in excitement when I was talking about the mental load and so I'd love to know what your thoughts on that are.

Nivedha Venkatesh (57:44.873)

I mean, I think one point to your previous question about approaching CX in expansion, think the way we're approaching it right now is even something as small as a error message on PageLoop's app has to be very clearly modeled. So I think there is opportunities for

CX outside of your traditional like CS or support or any of those roles that are very product based, know, even our email notification that goes out for any small thing. Like we pay a lot of attention to each and every part of those things. I think there is so much opportunity for CX and I think that shows the quality of what you're going after.

So I think that's kind of something that I'm seeing now. You know, as someone who is kind of getting a bird's eye view while also getting into the nitty gritties, I know my team sometimes gets annoyed with me when I say, like this little button should have been a little bit on. And they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, you know, do you not see? Like they may accidentally click that if they were trying to do something. So anyway, I think that is definitely one part. I think on the mental load,

Yeah, I think all of us feel that constantly. I think we're all, or at least most of us, or how I see myself, I love planning things, I love thinking about the future, and that does come with mental load of figuring out what I need to focus on today and what I need to focus on for the year. And that does add a lot of pressure to do things well, to do things very thoughtfully.

empathetically. So you're not just thinking about your own goals, but you're also thinking about how your goals affect others. What are others goals? How does that affect you? And it's all happening in like microseconds. So when you said that I was like, my God, yes. That is such an important part of being a founder, a woman founder. It's something that I've had to teach my team in certain senses that

Nivedha Venkatesh (01:00:13.074)

Hey, like at this point, I expect you all to be thinking about CX at least 50 % of the way that I think about CX. That every part of these things have to be tested. There can't be silly bugs that we could have very easily avoided because we just chose to overlook the smaller details. I think the smaller details is where the mental load comes because you're thinking till the final 100%.

of that task. You're not just thinking like 80 % of the way because the quality on anything comes post the 80 % till the 100. So the 80 to 100 is where the mental load I think spikes up, which I can very clearly see in a founder role. I know all of you here, including you, Sarah, even though you say you're not a founder, like technically you run these podcasts, you've been doing this for so long. I think you should also accept that you are among us.

Sarah Caminiti (01:01:08.415)

Thank you very much. I will take that hat. It's very kind. But it's so true. It's so true. And I love that you made the comment about the button because that's something that I bring up a lot when I'm talking about product and I'm talking about weaving CX into all of those decisions because you have seen what happens when you don't think about the button. You've felt what happens when the button is too close or when...

when the docs don't explicitly say you have to click this button here, but they skip over to the next thing. And every time a customer reaches out or every time a customer has to pause and be like, did I do this right? They're putting doubt in their ability to be successful using your product. And that doubt, it is a seed.

that every single time it shows itself, it's watering that seed and eventually they will feel like this is not a space that they can be successful and they are not being heard because you know no one's paying attention to the buttons and and and and that's just it's such an easy thing to do right

but you have to always be thinking about doing it right, which is where that mental load comes in. But also you're teaching your team how to have that not be invisible labor on your part, having it just be a Tuesday. This is what you do. This is a normal thing for us to think about. This isn't a thing that I wake up in the middle of the night because I realized something. This is something that we all probably wake up a few times because we're all thinking about it.

and that shared ownership, not in a, it's everybody's responsibility, therefore it's nobody's responsibility since, but in the way that it should be of, in order for us to be successful, every single space needs to be able to have a voice and to shine. And all three of you are building tools to prove.

Sarah Caminiti (01:03:25.909)

How important it is because that's what these tools do that's why AI has been such a wild ride in CX because it's finally proven all this stuff that we've been doing manually for years actually drives things forward and It's because you've been listening and because you felt the pain that you're able to be like yeah This is so important that this like you said Pat needs to be at the top priorities on your list of problems to solve

and to have it be women that are leading it is also sending a message of this is an undervalued space and here are people that are usually undervalued especially in the founder space and we're thriving because we're doing it right and we're showing that you can care about this stuff it's not something that's going to cost you in the end it's actually going to cost you if you don't and Emma like you were saying like

with Pat explaining how she's doing it in her company, that's proof. That is the missing thing a lot of the time. And that's what I've learned when it comes to leadership, when it comes to your company as a whole, when it comes to CX, when it comes to just life in general, is so easy to go back to what's safe, even if you know it sucks and it's terrible because...

That's all you know. That's all you've ever seen. So it has to be done this way. If everybody's doing it this way and they never do it any other way. But when you actually see people do it differently, then it's like, oh, I'm not alone. This is safe. This works. There's proof. And it's through conversations like this that makes me really happy because now you know that Pat thinks about it this way.

and now you can talk about it and be loud about it and you know it's just it's a it's a really powerful thing what the three of you are doing.

Emma Roffey (01:05:26.318)

Yes, it's absolute evidence. It's, what we're about is, I suppose it's with a positive side of CX, of trusted, we're trying to amplify those positive voices and enabling those peers to get so, you know, the path that the path has done that through experience, bitter experience, then I trust that and the experience that you've had and put that in place far more than I trust a white paper or, or someone saying, well, you should do it like this.

or a consultant, it's like, no, I want someone who's had that experience and then I will trust, you you implicitly to do that. And then, you know, that's what we're about is in the buying process is connecting those fears and amplifying those voices from the people you trust. And that's what it, so it's the, you know, it's harnessing all that positive experience from CX, which today I have to say does go unharnessed sometimes.

it is an invisible and we just want to make it visible, understand the impact it has on that growth that it can have when you do have a good customer experience and a really positive experience. yeah, it's trusting your peers.

Nivedha Venkatesh (01:06:46.334)

Yeah, I love that because one of the, I think, most shocking things that happened in the recent was we helped a customer migrate from a different tool to intercom for their help docs and they didn't ask for it. You know, it was never part of the plan they paid for. None of that. But we were like, hey, it's going to take a long time for you to do this. Like you have hundreds of articles. How are you planning to do it? And they were like, you know what?

going to copy paste it and we were like don't worry about it like we're going to figure this out and I think two days later they were like we want to take you out for lunch and I was like what? And I was like a customer wanting to take their vendor out for lunch it's usually the other way around. I think it's it's so powerful like you don't have to do

And it took us 30 minutes to do that, like, you know, to write a little script that migrated their articles over. It didn't really matter. We did that and we forgot. We moved on to the other thing. But for them, it was such a huge deal. And I think it's in those small...

moments in those very little experiences that you're able to create. So doesn't have to be like this grand gesture of sending massive gifts to your customers or big product launches. They are not going to remember any of that, but they will remember that you wrote a script for them to migrate and save them hours and hours and hours of time. yeah, think speaks to the experience. I think that all of us want to

show and I think like Pat and Emma, both of you said that you're also your own customers of your product. I think that's such a fundamental aspect of me being able to trust somebody to say, hey, like if you are telling me and you face this problem, you built this out of your personal pain, I will take your word for it over someone doing Gartner doing some research of like, you know, 30,000 companies in the world.

Nivedha Venkatesh (01:08:52.214)

yeah whatever it's numbers but you're speaking from personal experience so I love that I love that thanks for sharing that Emma

Sarah Caminiti (01:08:59.477)

I'm so bummed that we are out of time. really, I didn't touch a single thing from our Word doc and I could keep talking to you ladies forever. But what is one just like quick thing that you want to end with that? I mean, I've been toying with like 27 different questions to ask you guys for this last one. But I think like, what's your favorite part about being a founder? Because it's such a leap of faith and it's such a...

It's a big deal. what, just really quick, what's each of your favorite things so far about being a founder? And I'll start with you. I'll just go right around.

Emma Roffey (01:09:39.534)

Thanks. I don't know. It's so new. don't know. I don't know. What is it? I suppose it's just the...

It's just, I don't know, what is it? What's my favourite part?

It's just that it's being able to put a dream into action, I suppose, that is what it is, and a strong belief to solve a problem. And I hopefully people will pay for our problem that we're solving. So I like that. But it's when we went for investment, it's, as someone said, know, for instance, some angel investors as well, whole different story about investment.

But I did the stomach test, the gut test. I thought if a friend of mine or someone else is they're prepared to put their hard earned money into us. And I thought, how do I feel? Does my stomach go, not at all, not at all. And I was like, great. And I thought that was a real acid test for this. Why suddenly were all of us going to do that? we're not going to. There's no question in my mind that we're not going to be successful.

There's no horrible stomach feeling. it's the, it's the, passion, being able to put that dream and that passion into place. think that's the most exciting thing about being a founder. And I read somewhere, if I could just end on something, you'd decide whether you want to keep this in or not, Sarah, but learning fast and...

Emma Roffey (01:11:21.216)

I learned that if you do any podcast, you should always have a call to action. And I thought, okay, as a founder, what's my call to action? And we have the offer for any listeners of a, you can call it an advocacy maturity matrix, a trust maturity matrix that gives you an assessment of how, where you are at the level of trust and trust led growth in your organization. So if anyone is listening.

then that is my offer as well.

Sarah Caminiti (01:11:53.354)

awesome. I'll put it in the show notes and make sure that that link is available to everyone. I mean, I'm gonna go and check it out as soon as we get off of this call. That sounds really, really cool. Okay, I'm not gonna see it right now, but don't worry listeners, by the time this comes out, it will be ready for you to rock and roll.

Emma Roffey (01:12:03.423)

when I ask when's it going out because I've got to finalise it.

Emma Roffey (01:12:11.374)

I will make it externally available, which we're just doing that. So we're working at fast pace. This one I'll sprint at. I don't need to walk on this one. I will sprint at that one, OK?

Sarah Caminiti (01:12:23.925)

Well, I cannot wait. I cannot wait. What about you, Pat? What's your favorite thing about being a founder?

Pat Osorio (01:12:30.722)

Besides what Emma shared, think building, putting your dream and turning that into reality, that's definitely great. think the other thing that sometimes is not great, sometimes it feels bad, but it's like you don't have excuses of like, oh, I can't do this because a lot of times if you're in an organization, you have like blockers somehow. And when you're the founder, of course you have other founders, you have a bunch of things, but it's on you. If the culture is bad, it's on you. If the product is not good, it's on you. And then so that's great.

like knowing that this responsibility slash opportunities there is great.

Sarah Caminiti (01:13:09.067)

that's so cool. It's true though. It's really true. I love that you have a positive way of thinking about that though, because it could go south in people's minds, you know, when they're thinking about having that be a part of their role and, but it shows in how you show up, how much you care about it and how much joy you get out of doing it right. And I think that's really cool. And you Niv, what's your favorite?

Nivedha Venkatesh (01:13:38.443)

Yeah, I was trying not to think about the answer, because I really wanted to hear Emma and Pat. I'd say there's two things. One is it's been the biggest karmic growth in the sense of I never imagined being a founder. It never crossed my mind.

And at the same time, it feels like the right thing to do. To, I think, take something that's just an idea because ideas are plenty. But going out there, getting funding, finding co-founders, hiring your first, you know, set of team who believe in you when there's literally nothing, like absolute zero customers. And I think that is...

That really blew my mind when I actually went through that entire process of raising funds and talking to potential co-founders, one of who turned out to be my husband, who knew. And so a lot of those things where you don't realize that it's even possible are actually possible. So I realized how much I kept underestimating myself. But then when I sort of...

across that chasm, I realised that, it's actually possible. And the second one, I think, that really surprised me. I never saw myself as, I'm a woman-like founder, but the minute I put that on my LinkedIn, I had so many women actually reach out to me and be like, hey, how do I do this? And I was like, my god, I would love to tell you everything because it's actually possible. And I think it gives you so much freedom. I felt that freedom, you know, when the first time I drove a car.

by myself. feel like it's a similar kind of freedom that you feel. So I think those are my two favourite moments of being in this journey.

Sarah Caminiti (01:15:40.341)

Thank you three so much for for trusting me with this conversation for being open to this conversation I may bug you to come back because Emma you touched on it really quickly the the whole investor piece of things I think could be a really interesting conversation as well But I know you guys are busy and we have gone over time, but thank you three so so much I hope you have a great rest of your day and Yeah, thanks

Nivedha Venkatesh (01:16:07.477)

Thank you, Sarah. Thank you both. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Pat Osorio (01:16:07.542)

Thank you. It was great.

Emma Roffey (01:16:07.598)

Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Nice to meet you, Roland. Hi, Pat, again.

Sarah Caminiti (01:16:13.066)

Bye bye.