Productiv COO, Munish Gandhi on Harnessing AI for Streamlining Contract Renewals and Procurement, Optimizing SaaS Costs, Governance and Risk Management, SVB's Collapse, and more

00:13 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice and, at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, michael Kanag, and our guest today is Moonish Gandhi, the co-founder and CEO of Productive, a SaaS management platform backed by the likes of Excel, norwest, ivp, okta and Lazian so some good corporate VC in there. Prior to Productive, moonish was a revenue ops leader at LinkedIn and previously held corporate strategy and tech roles at Bain, hp, oracle and Equinix. Moonish, welcome, thanks for being here. Thank you so much, michael, for having me. Let's dive right in. 

00:51
I generally start with that question of hey, how'd you end up in this role? But I love your tech and here's why I want to go straight into it right now. I like to say that tech companies are made up of people, processes and servers. When that macro economic climate turns rough, companies tighten their belt, they cut op-ex. We see this in the form of mass layoffs, but the other place that you can turn to are SaaS applications, which can often be murky and complex. So, without turning this into an infomercial, tell us a little bit about Productive, why you created it, and then what it does and how our listeners can leverage it Absolutely. 

01:33 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
So in the last five, 10 years or so there's been a massive, massive explosion in SaaS applications. Pick any title in America and at least 20, probably 50 SaaS companies building for that. 

01:44
When I say, pick any title, whether it's your developer, your FP and A person, your product manager, so on and so forth. So there's been massive explosion in SaaS, but you combine that with the amount of money that has been available to companies to invest in growth, it's been like we're coming out of a growth at all costs mindset, which translated into very lax governance on which applications you need to purchase to make your people productive. Very lax governance on once you buy applications are they actually being implemented the right way? Today we got to a point where IT finance leaders CEOs are looking to optimize costs, to minimize risks and to build operational excellence across the business. If you're a technology company, your number one cost is people. Most likely, your number two cost is software, whether it's infrastructure or SaaS. So we saw that coming in the last five plus years ago when we started the company, and we really thought that there has to be a different way on how software drives employee productivity. It's not an employee-driven decision. You still need a way to get value from all the software that you're using. For now, actually, when we started the company, we believe that when teams align, great things happen, and the way you bring teams together is through the power of data. 

03:09
So what is productive At the core? We are a SaaS intelligence platform for the modern enterprise. You may ask me what is that? Typically, through a SaaS management platform, you get visibility into all applications being used across the enterprise, whether it's purchase by IT, functional leads, teams, individuals. We are productive, provides insights, recommendations across these specific business initiatives. If you want to govern your SaaS portfolio, you work with us. You want to rationalize SaaS spend, you work with us. And if you really want to build a process around streamlining SaaS procurement, you work with us, so that software is, but is deliberately where everybody's aware of what you are buying, so you can connect the dots between software and it actually leads to the goal you have, which is driving for productivity. 

03:55 - Michael Koenig (Host)
If we talk about the SaaS savings, which you just said are oftentimes the second largest cost center, there, there can be huge savings. Let's put some numbers behind this Gartner. They put out a forecast indicating that the annual SaaS expenditure will grow by more than 19% to 195 billion, and that 25% of that software is underutilized or over deployed. At a previous company years ago, I found and removed 40 seats on a sauna that were completely unused. I'm guessing you all have some insights and you spoke about one of the causes just being money was flowing much easier. What else is happening here? Why is there such underutilization? What have you all seen through the product you built? 

04:48 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
So I think about underutilization in two buckets. One is you have too much of an application and one is the other one is you have too many applications. So let's look at what, how we got here. Like, they are very clear incentives. That SaaS company said if you buy more volume, you get lower unit costs. And when you buy software, there's a lot of euphoria. So you tend to think that your entire organization is going to actually use a sauna. Back to the example that you had that doesn't happen, right. So your actual utilization versus what you purchase tends to be pretty low 12 times a tool like an e-signature tool. You buy it for a lot of people using the e-signature tool, but they don't need the entitlements that are required to create new envelopes, they only need to sign. So essentially, people buy software independent of. Does everybody need the right license for that specific tool? And people buy software where they think everybody in the company is benefit from it. 

05:51
Just because somebody can't benefit doesn't mean they are adopted until benefit and you only buy software for people who actually need that. So that is how you can. For any specific application like your CRM tool, you can save 20, 30% cost and that's what we are working closely with very a lot of customers in terms of identifying those and helping them action those. The second bucket is even more interesting. Remember, like now we are out of COVID, but three, four years ago when COVID happened, people were still hiring a lot of people. When you hire new people, you are hiring behaviors, as in my previous company I used a specific project management tool. 

06:30
I need that tool to be productive. Pick any category. That's, when you hire people, you hire a lot of new behaviors, and when you have lacks governance, you have many tools of the same kind. Many companies you work with have 6 or 7 different project management tools, product management tools, portfolio management tools. At some point when you have 20 tools, it actually is bad for productivity. Forget about the financial aspect, like when you have to work with finance, use a specific project management tool, to work with marketing a different one, etc. So the second category, slightly more difficult, is you have too many tools in the same category. Now you need to have a standard, as in these are the IT sanction tools for any specific category, and that's how we will both drive better productivity and much, much lower cost. So in that itself, companies have shut down tools worth hundreds of thousands of dollars just because they're too much to engage. I love. 

07:31 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Sassuphoria. It's the honeymoon of after you buy a SaaS product. This product can solve all of our problems right, all the problems you talked a lot about. Governance and the other parts of this are risk and compliance, or GRC, and the importance around it is rising and we're seeing that companies really do need to start paying attention to it earlier on in their life cycle. How should they think about that at the very base, minimum level? 

08:09 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
So what do you expect from software? 

08:10 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Let's start there. 

08:12 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Like why do you purchase software? You make software to streamline processes, to make your people more effective. Saas is a different delivery model. It's a different billing model, but it doesn't change what you buy like. Why? 

08:26
you buy a software, so our most mature customers. They have a specific process. They call it a software architecture review board, where every piece of software that is purchased goes through that. Like you may be head of sales trying to bring in a new piece of sales software, so you bring like, hey, this is why I want to purchase this software. And the architecture board helps to vet Is it duplicating with somebody? Does it actually meet the compliance posture we have as a company? Is it soft to? If you're a financial company, you know there are specific standards there. If you have government business, is it FedLamb compliant, etc. So basically you control what compliance at the point of entry. It cannot be an afterthought and to do that you need a very, very clear understanding of what you have, why you're buying a new tool and does a new tool meet all the criteria that you have? So that's where you bring in compliance much earlier into the process. Very data driven approach. 

09:31
And this is something also typically a CEO would sponsor, saying we are doing the right thing by the company. I'm not against you buying a tool. I want to make sure that we get the right benefit and we don't break anything of which may get, we may get ordered later, etc. So it's bringing that ownership mindset to software chasing. 

09:50 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That, to me, is going in and you talked about hiring behaviors and that's a big just change in operating behavior. You spoke just now about controlling it at the point of entry. One of the things I hate is getting an email from some external account exec saying hey, we noticed that there are 60 people with a two cows domain using our software and would you like to save some money on it? Let's get you on an enterprise plan or something like that. Oftentimes they're freemium usually, and at that point I have no control over the point of entry. I think a lot of companies just experience this with open AI and chat GPT. That can be quite severe. It can have severe consequences. That we saw, as we saw, with Samsung, when they input all this proprietary code into open AI. I mean, how do we pull back at that point, can we? How do we pull back and get control at that point of entry? 

10:52 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
The foundation of what we do as a business is to provide you visibility, independent of how people are using tools. For example, visibility comes from you have officially sanctioned something, so from your financial ERP. Somebody is expensing something as a second source, somebody is using their email credentials company email credentials to log in. And then we also have network integrations, so cloud access, security, brokers. So with all of that, we'll paint for you the fact that you have 60 people using either the premium product or paid product on the credit card. So you're not surprised. And those are the kinds of insights which we will help provide you so you can optimize and nationalize your portfolio. And because, whether you're a CFR or a CEO, the one thing they all hate is that, hey, you need to sign this paperwork, but this state, otherwise 80 people on your company will stop having access. You're like why are you which? Why do I not hear about you? So I think that's unless you have good visibility how can you make decisions? 

11:59 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It can be tough, I mean, especially when you have like Google SSO. It makes it so easy to one sign up for whatever, but also to have like multiple different accounts where you may actually have a corporate account and, for whatever reason, that person use Google SSO and, I think, get added. So, yeah, it isn't streamlined right and it's quite sort of meandering. And how do you get there? Let's talk about AI and how it fits into this picture, and not necessarily talking about generative AI, but just in general, being able to leverage that in the type of scenario that you're talking about. Which is this oversight, this governance? How are you all thinking about this? 

12:47 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Everybody is thinking about AI and, end of the day, I believe, fundamentally AI solves two problems. First is it is able to better collate all information out there. What that means is we have a lot of information about our customers, but then we can also combine that with a lot of publicly available information around, like what tools exist out there? How can we contextualize what a company is using, not just based on their own data, but also what exists out there, right? 

13:21
So AI, like today, one use case we have is around fuzzy logic. We can go through your finance ERP and see, okay, somebody may actually be expensing a software tool, but marking it as attainment and needs, so we know that. It's like we can match based on app names, vendor names, et cetera, et cetera, but, end of the day, it's a way to collect all the data into an external. The second big, big part where AI is going to play is now that you have all this information, what do you do about it? I think, and for people who are in our domain, like procurement people, it people, finance people who are using our tools, how do you become a co-pilot for them? 

14:05
Hey this happened. For example, this last two weeks a specific application went from 10 people to 60 people. You really need to pay attention to it because otherwise you're gonna be surprised downstream. Or an employee is going in and buying a new tool, then you interject that saying by the way, we use these four other tools which solve the same problem. Why don't you explore those? So, essentially, anticipate what the next action is for a specific user, bring it to them. Or, if they're trying to do something which you think is not the right next action, then interject and provide to them alternative. The goal is not to shut down things. The goal is to help people make the right decisions. 

14:56 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Let's toss in that generative AI piece. Now I saw that one of the things that productive can do is look at, I believe, the actual contracts and the stipulations that we have there. I think AI is really good at sort of that fuzzy or generative AI that is is really good at the fuzzy part of something that's less deterministic than numbers and more subject to different parts of interpretation. That lends itself really well to structured language. If you're looking at contracts, for instance, and you have renewal coming up, how can you all think about this? How do you all think about leveraging that type of generative AI to streamline the renewal process? 

15:47 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic question. So today we already help customers understand their contracts better. We have a human-plus machine learning way to do that, so we roughly extract about 10 attributes about a contract. When it's a renewal date what assets have you bought? So license types, how many of them? Do you have an auto renewal clause, yes or no? So basically, it's a limited set of attributes that we're able to pick, and the reason why we do it that way is because there's a real cost for us to read that contract and validate. What AI can really benefit is that we can increase from 10 to 50. And not just that we can much more easily compare contracts once we do that, Say hey, do you have the right? 

16:38
terms relative to customers like you, which, as humans, like somebody to go to 50 contracts and say what are the things that really matter? What are the variances in terms of the SLAs that you're getting, the overage fees? There's so many things that are in the contract, and the bigger the contract, the more complex they are. So where we see AI playing a big role is helping our customers procure better, like these are the terms that you should focus on and also renew better, as in these are the things that you should be able to push back on, or where you should be able to get more feasible terms for the vendor, based on the spend you have with the vendor, right, because that signifies the importance that you provide to the vendor, that they should be able to partner better with you on these specific things. 

17:31 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I love this. My dream is to not have to negotiate renewals, to not have to negotiate period right Whether it's contract terms, whether it's business terms, doesn't matter. I love the concept of being able to take your actual usage data of number of seats. How that compares to what was laid out in the contract, where we're underutilizing this, we're overutilizing this and just be able to have something completely crank out and automate that entire process. I mean that to me is wow, that's crazy. 

18:09 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. 

18:10
I think also, just to build on what we were talking earlier about from a procurement standpoint, the way we think about AI and data's, better workflows fundamentally there's an opportunity to automate a lot more of the procurement process overall in companies Better integrate with other systems. 

18:37
Really, track when you are buying software Are you saving money is a good ROI, so that there's something there for sure which can be much more automated, so that somebody like you or the CFO, they can rely on a process for procurement. Also, there has to be almost like a workflow to align multiple stakeholders in the annual process, because if you pick any specific tool, the owner many times is in the business. So for a sales tool, it would be your head of sales, your head of revenue, ops, potentially marketing and definitely IT. From architecture standpoint, security, legal, from a contract standpoint. How do you orchestrate so many people working together in a procurement process where they all, a lot of times, they have decision rights, they have veto rights, but how do you create a collaborative environment for them to work together and bring the right data and insights, saying, okay, you are purchasing this too. 

19:44
We have an overlap. Have you assessed that you are purchasing this tool? This does not meet our compliance posture? Or you are purchasing this tool? This is something that you know does not integrate with a specific application? Those are the kinds of questions that today get lost in email. So one of the things that we are leaning in very, very heavily into is that we are big fans of SaaS. I think SaaS fundamentally helps employees be more productive, but there is just so much friction in that just because you can buy software doesn't mean you know how to buy software. So our job is to help you buy the right software with the right process and with the right compliance and financial and risk management, and that's why we believe having a workflow. 

20:37
You have a product now called Apricot Meta is the right way for you to train everybody involved in the software buying process and help them follow our process. 

20:50 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Okay, so I want to just pull this back. Also, it's kind of funny, right? This is a SaaS to manage your SaaS. That's not lost on me, no, but listen, I haven't gone into anyone's product this extensively, nor have I ever opened the show by saying, all right, we're going to talk about your path and how you end up in the COO's seat and what you actually do. We'll get there. 

21:16
But first let's dive into the meat and potatoes here. Reason being why I wanted to do this is the number of conversations that I have amongst my peers and other COO's and operations. Folks is just how do you manage this? I got this Excel sheet. It's got 170 SaaS on it. I've got 35 columns. That has all of the different terms that I'm tracking and you know, hopefully we don't miss a renewal or something like this. And then add on that access controls right Offboarding someone and leaving that access for them is a huge vulnerability from a compliance and an infosector perspective. So productive. I was super keen to have you on to actually dive into this, because it is top of mind for us, especially cutting out those 40 unused seats from Asana, because that stuff's expensive and there's good savings that comes from it. Okay, well, fantastic. Okay. Now let's get out of our sassuforia, which I love, by the way. That's like part of my vernacular at this point. Let's back into Munish, munish. How did you end up in the COO role? 

22:31 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yeah. So I called myself the accidental founder, like I had a burning ambition. It is a business school essay Like why do I want to go to business school? I want to start a company. It took me only I guess what 10 years or so after that to get prepared to start a company. But really the founding story was I wanted to work with very, very smart people. So I have two amazing co-founders Jodi, who's our CEO, very strong product mind, very visionary. Ashish was my CTO, who has big, large engineering teams and many companies. And I was everything else guy. 

23:11
Like how do you start building a business in terms of, you know, early days, customer success, sales, marketing. What's the message? How do we pay people? So, setting up a payroll and getting our first legal contracts out, what does it mean to start building a HR team? So basically, when we started the company, we had okay, let's make sure you have the light investors and we can fund the company and, with the right product vision, let's make sure that we can actually build it, have a strong engineering team and let's make sure that we can operate well as a company. 

23:44
So that's how we came together and the CEO was like that catch all things spanning both operations and go to market that I started Over time. Of course, we have had a lot of executives now who own each of those functions, but it is all about how do we stay nimble, stay true to our core vision and values, which is, you know, how I became the CEO and, by the way, I think you and I spoke about this a little bit earlier. Right, ceos come in different flavors. There is one which is very much all back office. Second, which is all go to market. Third, which is more like a chief of staff for the CEO and special projects, because initially there was no go to market. They started more on the operation side. They started the foundation for the company but then, more and more, the last few years have spent most of their time on the go to market side. 

24:38 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It's an interesting seat that you're filling for your product specifically and it almost seems tailor made for you. The interesting thing and I want to just clarify for our listeners Monish, you did not just graduate business school and then hop into founding your company. Okay, this is very different here, because you know MBAs all the time no offense to our MBA listeners, I do not have one, but it's very. Hey, I'm going to business school, I'm going to start a company right now. You had a lot of stops along the way at some very major companies doing very major roles. The last one, before productive, was RevOps at LinkedIn. So this is like a lot of deep experience. Generally, when you're selling software like the saying is the easiest software to sell goes towards sales and marketing. Right, those dollars really fly freely. Now, yours is not aimed at sales and marketing companies. As someone with a commercial background like you, how did you go about that? Because it's much more difficult sell when times turn tough. Software that doesn't go towards top line gets the prioritized. 

25:49 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yeah, so. So where was that at LinkedIn, Like maybe I'll give you a window because that's how I navigated to productive. So it was part of a small team and we are trying to make LinkedIn for sales. At some point sales navigator product used to be called LinkedIn for sales. So then we have B2C offer and then our charter was to make it a standard B2B product. Any modern sales team should use sales navigator. The tactics which were there were all about hey, maybe we can have an individual drive. That's our team flight. 

26:24
And at some point we'll underlight to have enterprise condition with a CRO. The reason I bring it is that, like I saw firsthand, like typically the different paths that enterprise companies are trying to build a big business. But I also saw so much friction that was there on the buyer side where nobody wants to negotiate with vendors. Nobody wants to be told that you have 100 people using a specific tool in your account. So that was sort of my point that this problem on our biases is very prevalent when you talk about vendors. 

27:02
At the same time the productivity impact was very real as in when you use some of these tools, you actually get people more effective product by their jobs. 

27:10
So that is one point of view. The Jody the CEO he said, basically Getting everyone the right tools to do their job. It's a data problem, like you have to think through a longer time and on what is the attribution that comes as in any use these specific tools in these specific way you actually get to be more productive and that's why we call the company productive right. And then you know we also thought about another day there should be much less friction in buying software, whether it manifests to a market base or in some other shape or form, right. So when we started the company, the immediate problem was I just need better visibility and I need to streamline the growth. So we are on to the, the first act, but then the, the, the bigger Charter that we have as a company can use to grow and mature, is how do we start Connecting those jobs and start helping, no matter what job function you are? 

28:15
in with Ways to help you be more productive in your job. These are the kinds of interactions you should have from a collaboration standpoint, from specific systems of work standpoint so that you're effective and productive in your job. 

28:29
So when you're building a company, you need to figure out what is the initial Entry point. There is no company. This is only get to. There's enough money for your first act, right? I think we thought this is the most compelling problem that we can solve today around lack of governance, around science and our lack of Standardize with a procure sauce. That's the first act we're on, but the goal is to build something much bigger which will have a much larger impact for our customers. 

28:59 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Going back to the corporate experience, that you have. A lot of things that work at the corporate level Don't quite work at the startup level. A lot of things that work at the startup level don't quite work at the corporate level. What are some of the practices that you took from your time, let's just say, at LinkedIn, or whether it was you know any of the other companies that you were like? This is something that I'm going to definitely bring with me and I'll adapt it if I need to. 

29:27 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
So, in the couple things that I really took away from LinkedIn, number one was maybe we qualified in our own words. Is this plan to win big unless? You know where you are going. You do not get there Like doesn't matter, like at some point they were three of us and you would say, okay, what are we building? 

29:45
but you're very clear on what are we targeting and you know being always brutally honest on things that are going right or things that are not going right. I think we even had that amazing culture when there was intellectual honesty in both gold setting and then where are we on Attaining those goals? So that's a core skill that I took away. Any point of time and this is for fellow CEOs Should have a very clear narrative of the business. These are things that I'm excited about, things which are going well. These are things that are not going well, that we are actively working on. These are things that are not going well and I don't care because you know you can't fix all the fire. So I think that that, that specific narrative, I think that's a core skill set that really is hard to find at LinkedIn. 

30:34
The second is equally important is the relationships matter that you have to build relationships. You have to. The trust is on whether you're talking to customers or they are talking to your own employees, whether you're talking to partners, whether you're talking to investors. Building relationships is very, very important because, end of the day, you need metrics to run our business, but you build up the sweet with people. So, at scale, they did a phenomenal job of Helping foster those relationships internally, and that's where the culture was, was born. So I think that's again something that I always Remember that everybody, every condition I go into, I go in with extreme empathy, as in like what do they, what does somebody expect to hear from me, how I can help them, versus these are the five slides. 

31:28
I want to talk. Talking about. This is my message. You got to sit there and listen and be well. No, I mean, I just wrong. Relationships come from empathy and I think that's again something that you know I'm not, and every day I think about how can I make an impact there's that saying Business would be easy if it weren't for people. 

31:50 - Michael Koenig (Host)
How did LinkedIn go about fostering those relationships? 

31:55 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
I think it is a Different ways, like in team settings they could always open, warmly around you know how are things like, just just start there and Individual settings again try to build that, that common connection, which is different for different people. So it was very like in organic In some ways, like even like Jeff, we used to be the CEO back then like there was a new heart welcome and you get to say something at a company on hands and be completely vulnerable and sometimes silly. But I think those are the ways that, at a very top-down level, every leader that I worked with spoke with, they would always ask me like what do you think? And like you know, how can I help, how should we engage? And so it comes from a place of I want to build a relationship with you versus I want to hold you accountable for x, y, 3 is a very different thing. 

32:54
So it was sort of built into the company fabric. The way I let my team. You know, I took a lot of back saying this is what is unique about this. This is what is unique about about the culture. Like we, we always like people first because that's too much, too generic, but be like individual first. They try to get to know people, be curious and then Don't judge based on what they are saying. Try to get to the why they are saying. 

33:26 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Sometimes tough to do right, sometimes very tough to look at the intent behind words, especially when a lot of it is not vocalized right. When we're reading on flat or reading a text message or an email, it's easy to come across terse, it's easy to lose that meaning. You know for sure we definitely need training when to say and where to say it. So, all right, we, it's been a bit meandering, but I love this conversation. Let's hop into to the last and final question, because I am mindful of your time, and that is as a COO. We've all had those experiences where something just totally nuts comes across our desk and we're just like. I Really never thought I'd see that. Is there one that you can share with us? I think I can share, and quite a few entrepreneurs face that a couple of months ago. 

34:24 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
So you know, I had a full day plan and then Suddenly one of my very good friends, who happens to be a part of my career, happens to be a banker, called me and say Do guys bank with SVB? I think you can say that and I said yes. And then he said, telling you as a friend, drop everything and pay attention and make a decision. I won't say more. Like I said, like it's your decision, but he said it's something very real. So literally what that transpired is I put together our head of finance, our CEO, and said look, this is important again. We all have meetings, but we need to game plan, need to be very, very Action oriented. It does I can be. Actually, it doesn't mean that we need to act I. It means that we have a very clear opinion on how we are going to tackle this situation. 

35:19
So it was a frenzy of an hour many, many conversations as to what's happening. You know, we talked to a bunch of other founders. We talked to a bunch of investors. We're just trying to collect data. They were positives and negatives of acting as in. We had some very real commitments that we made on maintaining some balances. So it's a non-trivial decision. But at the same time, people like you know we only bank with one bank in the most part and we have a payroll to meet and like we are not like a big, big company. So after an hour or so, you know, we made a very clear decision saying information is imperfect but the benefit of waiting is just not there, like we need to act now and we will deal with repercussions. 

36:12 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Like I would much rather say okay, all our cash is secured. 

36:17 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
Yes, we broke a covenant. Good problem to have on how to resolve versus. You know, our money is stuck and we can't make very bad problem to have. So it was a crucial moment. Now, I think, as a backend, it feels easy, but that is how we made a decision, like an hour and saying we are going to act and we will face the consequences later on what happened. 

36:42 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So that was not a memorable day, but not in a good way. 

36:52
It was a memorable weekend. I mean, that was crazy. I remember having those conversations. I mean you got to buy your friend a really nice bottle of scotch or something, because that's incredible risk management. That's also one of the things, and I didn't know that you all had your cash in SVB Otherwise I would have brought this up much sooner. But it's also part of bringing in risk management practices. Earlier on we talked about governance, risk and compliance. But you know, gosh, I was part of startups and we never thought about risk management right. But when you have a risk management practice or at least some advisors who are saying, hey look, here are your capital markets risks, here are your other financial risks, and you got to make sure that you have your legal and people operations practices and all these different things, I think there's also an opportunity to bring that more to smaller companies, though probably not as a SaaS. Well, Monish, thanks so much yeah. 

38:04 - Munish Ghandi (Guest)
And last thing I'd say on that is that this was like a real crisis and then in times of crisis, communication is so important, right? So it's not just that we acted, but then it's equally important that we communicated back to investors or, some extent, our customers. Like we had to quickly switch accounts because we had the CV bills coming. We communicated very quickly, actively, to all our employees because we had questions coming up on Slack. I said, hey, how are we handling this? So being decisive is very, very important, because it's a crisis. You will not have perfect information Never have. So, as long as you can one make a decision to clearly explain the rationale and the impact on all parties, I think that's what matters a lot more, because the word we live in will never have perfect information. I mean, that's what leadership is all about. 

38:53 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I'm trying to think about I mean, I remember taking panic phone calls. I'm also trying to think about being you and your CEO and the rest of your executive team and going wow, we got lucky, we got lucky. Ultimately, everyone got lucky, though in the end there, but nonetheless, crazy, crazy time. Well, mooneesh, thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it. This was fantastic. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, michael Kanigan, and a very special thank you to Mooneesh Gandhi for joining us today. Tune in next time for our next COO chat on Between Two COOs and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. Just visit BetweenTwoCOOscom for more and if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show so they can get great advice from phenomenal COOs. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. Tune in next time and until then, so long.