Preventing MarTech Stack Failures with Automated Testing and Monitoring - M.H. Lines

It's one of the scenarios that every revenue operator has nightmares about. You get that email from your boss or the VP or even the CEO asking why something is broken in your stack. And then you get that sense of panic. You start logging into things, checking things and you find out that yes, it's true.

You ask yourself, how could this happen? How could I miss it? And the answer, or at least a big part of the answer for me, is that in the martech and revtech world, we're still relatively immature in some ways compared to other technically oriented areas of the business, like engineering or I. T.

Fact is, a lot of early marketing automation professionals were basically demand gen folks who kind of started LARPing as I. T. People and for the record, I include myself in that category, but we didn't always know the best practices for ensuring observability. Reliability in our infrastructure.

We had to learn all these things the hard way. And we also lack the tools. So we didn't have QA automation. We didn't have smoke testing.

None of the things that a DevOps team today takes for granted. So this is the problem that today's guest set up to solve. She's had a long career as a marketing operations executive, including some orgs at places like Microsoft. And she's created a company called StackMoxie to provide easy testing And monitoring for the revenue stack.

MH lines, welcome to the Oh, thank you for having me. And by the way, I don't think you should include yourself in the relatively immature category. The LARPing thing you can include yourself in, but relatively immature, I think you set the bar. You know, I made sure we have a lot in common, I think, as we've identified over the years.

One thing I only realized while I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, preparing for this interview, is that we both started out one of our first jobs in the, uh, retail clothing sales industry. I was working at a sporting goods store in my hometown of Toronto. You started out at The Gap, where you said you learned the secrets to gap folding, and have retained them ever since. So what are the secrets to gap folding if you're not under NDA?

the point is that when you see it on the shelf, everything looks the same, right? When you walk into the gap, way back when we used to have the wall of khakis and a wall of denim, because that's what the, gap was all about when I'm aging myself, but you get the point. and so the point was that they all look the same. And so it's a fold.

Now, actually, if you watch YouTube, which you actually accomplish enough, that my guess is you don't watch as much YouTube as I do. But there's like these folding boards that help you get it in exactly the right size. And so in your closet, everything looks completely uniform and beautiful, like it used to on the go. So be able to do it without a folding board, you were kind of doing well, they had guides, but those guides would slow you down eventually.

So you were folding so much in like back to school season that, that you had to Be way faster. You know, it's like after that, I wound up bartending. even when I had a big career in PR, I helped bartend two nights a week. You know, when you're early, you have to use little jiggers and everything.

And eventually you can, free pour. It's like anything you, learn to do it without a net over time. you'll have to show me the folding technique cause I, uh, for the life of me, still have trouble folding a t shirt to look, Well, when you and I see each other, we will likely be traveling. And now, because I.

I worked in fortune 500 for a little bit too long. It's like a badge of honor to be able to travel with a single suitcase and not checking anything. And so to get everything in my carry on, even if I'm gone for 10 days, I roll it and like shove it in there. So I will have a different folding technique.

All right, much, to reveal. That's a separate podcast. I want to talk about your sort of evolution and entry into the world of marketing operations. You spent a lot of time in marketing leadership before moving towards mops kind of.

similar to myself in the early days of mops when it didn't really always exist, didn't have the identity that it has today. So I'm curious what drew you into that operational discipline from the world of, marketing in general. So I kind of came to marketing in a weird way. I was never very intentional about my career, kind of took the next fun job that I was offered.

and a lot of times as we're sequential in the same company, But my undergraduate degree was in finance because I liked math. I wanted there to be a right answer that you could check your work and verify that that was the right answer. and so I think there's so much subjective about marketing. It actually kind of reminds me.

My little brother lived with me for a while. His name's Alex and he is an incredible cook, um, and can cook me under the table. so while he lived with me, I learned to bake because I could do something precise and be good at something and contribute. And so it's kind of the same way with me and marketing.

There are incredible creative marketers out there and I'm just not one of them. And so I focused on the thing that I could do. Really well, which is make sure the thing worked and set it up and verify that it's working. And you can kind of see that as a through line in my life at this point.

that's so interesting. Cause I feel like I can really relate. I mean, I also moved, moved into ops from the marketing world and there's a lot that I like about marketing and I have a creative side to me, but I really struggled when you get into like the world of opinion, like this email is great. This email is not great.

and ultimately, you know, it's kind of like the highest paid person's opinion that wins in that debate a lot of the time. And so I found I gravitated towards ops for the, clarity that it brought that like it worked or it didn't, it, you were in a world of facts. In the world facts with marketers, I would highly recommend never trying to confuse them with facts like statistical significance though, because they, you know, Oh, we sent out this email and it worked way better. I'm like, you send it out to five people there are no facts there.

So don't, try and confuse marketers with a good time. Yeah, that is a whole other story. thinking about where ops is today, marketing ops specifically, I would say as a subdiscipline where it started and how it's evolved. What do you think, like it was getting right?

And getting wrong early on because it kind of stumbled into its own haphazardly, I guess, would be my observation. Not that I want to lead the witness here, but what was your perspective? Well, it's funny. I was recruited.

to lead the marketing apps organization at the Astros the year after they won the, world series. and I was really excited, but it turns out it was all about like printing the tickets. Like 50 percent of it was like print production. So like ops has been around for forever on some level.

And, a good friend of mine was at the time when I started in marketing ops, running marketing ops at Levi's, and it was definitely about pricing. So I think it's kind of been its own thing as defined by the different organizations it's in. I think the organizations that got it really well and I had the incredible benefit of working for just a beautiful leader at Microsoft who got it really right. Actually, a few of them and they were all very focused on supporting the marketer.

it's a really important thing. Big trip wire to talk about a marketing operations or rev ops being a support function but in my mind It was always about Letting that marketer be that creative genius and really know the customer and figure out what's motivating them from Either a creative perspective or messaging or an offer or pricing whatever it is and We were the ones who were able to make that scalable and efficient and get them the data they needed to make better decisions.

and that was definitely the team I supported at Microsoft's goal. you mentioned the contentious issue of ops as a service provider is not a service provider. Let's explore that, because I think unambiguously it is, and I think there's a bit of a complex around it, like, we are a service provider, we don't want to just be treated like a service provider, we want to be strategic, we want to provide strategic value, and I strongly believe in that. Where do you think the tension lies?

Like, is it something that we should just embrace and like be strategic within that channel? Or do you think there's like another facet to the role that it should be doing simultaneously to provide strategic value to the department? Well, I mean, I think this layers nicely with the debate Mike Rizzo posted on LinkedIn this morning talking about revenue operations and marketing operations and how 9 percent of RevOps leaders have come from a marketing operations background. And by the way, that's higher than I thought it was.

I think it's, it's similar, right? I truly believe the rev ops thing becoming just an extension of sales ops was, people willing something to be true because it benefits them. So there's a sales leader who thinks they should be the rev ops leader because they want all the budget and they want the bigger job title. even though they don't really care about marketing ops and they'd prefer not to have to talk to those people.

I think some of this, where Marketing operations not being a cost center is someone trying to explain their place in the world. some people. and so I think that's the way the dialogue kind of got started, right? Like, someone's really critical to an organization.

And so they feel like that means they couldn't be a support function. And I totally disagree with that. I think it's a very American kind of thing to think that support functions aren't some of the most critical roles in any society or organization. so I, I very strongly feel it is both strategic 100 percent a support function.

And critical all at the same time, I think the support function we all broadly understand in a lot of ways, like campaigns and lead flow and all that thing, where does the strategic Aspect of it live for you. This is something I think about a lot. I think the place most marketing operations professionals get it wrong and most sales ops and rev ops people get it wrong is they think of themselves as an administrator of the tool and supporting the ancillary integrations and what goes through that tool.

So I'm a Marketo administrator and I lead. Marketing ops, and so I think where we miss and where we're not strategic the way we should be is that very firmly believe marketing and revenue operations should sit with the business and there should be a corresponding function and it. But I think there always has to be someone in the business. Otherwise, I mean, let's be honest.

We've all worked for it. People who don't understand the business and miss the point. And so I think, you know, They need to understand that they're owning an infrastructure and they have to manage it like an infrastructure. And if they can't, then I.

T. should be involved. But that's the strategic piece to me. What is the outcome of this infrastructure?

What are we trying to accomplish? Is it scale? Is it efficiency? Is it understanding our data better and understanding that full end to end infrastructure and owning it, like, Okay.

you mentioned in the opening DevOps or, um, I. T. would own it. and then thinking about what's the outcome of that as opposed to is the.

API flowing into Marketo, who cares, right? Like the API has to flow into Marketo because the leads are making it from the website and they have to come with the right data. So it's not just a checkbox. Yes or no.

It's is my system working and accomplishing the goal. And I think, We have to be the ones to educate the CMO on what the goal should be for marketing or revenue operations. And that, again, should be efficiency and scale in my mind every time. Let's take a concrete example, just to like explore this perspective a little further, like our marketing automation platform, whether you're using Marketo or, or HubSpot or part or whatever, one of the new tools that's emerging.

There's almost a philosophy that's baked into having one of those systems that you're like, yeah, you're going to send emails, but if all you're doing was sending emails, you could have, you know, MailChimp or something like that. So clearly, you know, you get it, you're supposed to nurture and you're supposed to do all these other things with these tools. to what extent should ops be challenging almost the marketing strategy and informing that strategy? or is the strategic part like, here's how we can, you know, scale campaigns, do that more efficiently, but like the strategy piece, how we're actually going to market is up to you, marketing leader.

so we're hiring an engineering leader right now. and so I think it's very similar to being, in a startup where I own product and there's an engineering leader. Right? I want an engineering leader to come to me and say, Hey, we've heard this from the customers.

Did you know this is possible? And so I think there needs to be a forum where marketing ops is in the room when they're talking about what the customer pain points are or what the needs are. you know, generally it's an architect title is how I think about it and they go, hey, did, you know, this is even possible. And so sometimes there are things you can offer to customers, whether it's in products or whether it's in, Marketing operations or these operations functions, any technology function where I can't spend all day understanding what marketing and revenue operations people need and also watching every NVIDIA video to understand what new technology is on the market.

And so you want to partner in that. And I think that's what where the strategy comes in. You're a partner. That's brought in in the beginning to brainstorm what's possible, but they should know what's valuable to the customer.

And then we should be the one to solve the problem. again, Gary was in at Microsoft and was so brilliant about saying that, like, force them to bring you the problem, not the solution. So you can really get your head around what they're trying to solve. And then you help solve the problem.

So you don't try and. Solve the solution they gave you as opposed to not having a robust understanding of the product. You mentioned product, and I often saw that your role mixed marketing and product together, like there was kind of a theme in your CV. Where did that come from?

Was that by luck? Was that by preference? it's also why I would totally I've gotten laid off like 3 different times because I cannot help myself right when we're going through the marketing metrics and those were like nice layoffs. They were like, you're important.

You've done a really good job. People really trust you, but I cannot work with your pain in the ass. at some point when you've got the data set up and the systems working and the channels humming. it's really easy to see where there's gaps in the product, right?

Like if you've done a really good job, running sales, marketing, demand gen and channel strategy, it's very easy to see a hole in the market. so I would totally insert myself as kind of how I got into it the first. Place, the very first one I worked for an early CRM startup. and I demanded that they make some modifications to the product so that I could use it for marketing and PR because it was just right there.

It was so obvious to me. It wasn't CRM. It was a relationship management platform that I needed, to manage talking to. Media when I was doing PR or talking to analysts, like it wasn't just a CRM, it was a relationship management platform.

And so, yeah, it's cause I'm a pain in the ass. I think it's probably the. What Yes, sir. getting laid off for that reason?

Do you think it's because you're meant to be a founder there's a lot of people that could not go and be a founder face that scope of responsibility, make those decisions. There's other people who like want to have their fingers in all those pies. And evidently, that can be disruptive maybe if you're trying to do that and you're not in that role. Is that what pushed you there?

Well, what would happen ultimately is I want to figure it out. And I think you're exactly the same way. I think that's why we get along so well. Like, I just want to get my head around it until I understand something.

and so the higher up I would go in the organization, the more. I would ask questions, just trying to understand why things are the way they are. Um, and if we're in a meeting and someone brings something up, I would ask questions. Well, ultimately, I would wind up calling really powerful people to the mat with those questions.

I'm unapologetic about that, right? I don't want to spend time solving this problem. Like I worked at as a contractor on a big Salesforce project for a fortune 100 who shall not be named. And about halfway through, I realized my boss just did not care about anything.

And it turns out that she knew full well, the project was never going to be pushed to production, but she would lose budget if she didn't spend the dollars. So she was like, Hey, just shut up about it. Like, we don't need you to do meetings with other teams. If they make requests, capture them in the backlog for the future.

But like, we know this project is going to Your boss, this was you on the consulting side or the boss at the client side, like the project I was a consultant and this was the budget owner, the VP. and my director didn't understand it. So when I'd ask her questions, she kept having to pull me in with a VP. And finally the VP pulled me aside and said, Oh my God, just ship something.

Just say it was successful because we have to spend the budget or we'd lose it for next year. This ties us into the wonderful world of the mega enterprise. I was talking to another guest recently. He was like, yeah, and everything I've just said doesn't apply to enterprise and enterprise is like this parallel universe where like gravity doesn't apply and all the rules are different.

And you worked at Microsoft, So right now they're like around 000 people, that's like, not as a small size city anymore. if you put them all in one place, what's that all about? cause it's a different job. That's how I think about it.

Like running ops at that scale is a different job than, than where I work at a 400 person company. I mean, I think it's the thing I just mentioned, right? people have incentives that are set up at the very highest level. and those incentives create, gosh, I would almost say, the difference between complex and complicated problems is kind of one of my favorite building an engine in a car, right?

It's incredibly complicated or building a car, but it is knowable and it is testable. Complex is there are too many variables for something to be knowable and predictable, which is like traffic in a city. And so, I think how people will take the incentives and, progress forward with those incentives and what will happen at that size organization is complex. Like, you just can't understand what perversions will happen with whatever incentive structure you put in place.

And so there are microcosms. there are fiefdoms. There are people who, try and keep their head down. And then there are also people who, dramatically care.

so one of the incredible people I worked for at Microsoft, his name was, Karthik. And he's really who created the idea of our product because things kept breaking. And he said, if something breaks again, and you don't fucking tell me. First, everyone on the team's fucking fired.

Like he was awesome. Yeah. he cared dramatically and he cared across the whole system, even though he owned a massive chunk of it, but not all of it. I think that is definitely something That happens, but it's rare for someone to be that invested in the success of a program or that invested in the ultimate goal as opposed to in the I'm measured on this 1 thing.

So I'm going to be myopic and focus on this 1 widget and I might optimize this widget to the detriment of the widgets on either side of me. But who cares? I get it. And send it on my widget.

And so for me, I care about winning. you know, if it's a program and competition, I care about beating the competition. If I work for a company, I want to see Microsoft win, and I'll do it to my own detriment on occasion. So, yeah, I think that's why I probably wound up as an entrepreneur.

Like, I was always going to need to, to work towards the ultimate goal, not some local maximum. must have been difficult for you at Microsoft and like you were there for a few years. That wasn't a short stint if I'm recalling correctly. I was a contractor solely dedicated to Microsoft, so I wasn't in house.

although I was in quite a few calls where people didn't realize I was a V dash. so that was pretty funny. it was super hard. I just wanted to see what we were doing succeed.

And I didn't quite realize that occasionally I was asking questions that would throw people under the bus and make it hard for my people who were managing me to be successful. I wanted to see the program succeed. I didn't care if, one of my favorite, you know, Calls was going in to go see, Scott and he's like, Hey, I need you to hire 50 Marketo certified consultants, in the next 6 months. And I was like, that exam came out 2 and a half years ago.

There are not that many certified people on the West coast. what are you talking about? I know one of your other vendors has a bunch of them. Why don't I just train them and help them make them successful?

And he was like, why would you do that? And I'm like, cause I want you to be successful. Like, This is about making the program successful. And he's like, well, they're going to be able to compete with you then.

I'm like, I don't care. He's like, well, what if I give you 10 more dollars ahead or something? I can't remember what he did to help me recruit people better. Cause he's like, that is not in your best interest.

But I wanted the program to be successful and get great people as quickly as we could and get them trained. Do you think it's possible do really good work in that environment? Or do the perverse incentives of local maximums, et cetera, ultimately prevail? I think we did incredible work and I learned so much from the really brilliant people I got to work from.

So I think there are people who can rise above it and care. I think it's a hiring challenge to find people who can figure out how to play the game because you wouldn't make it right. You have to play the game or you would have gotten laid off at some point, and still care about success. And they had a ton of both.

People who, just played the game, but people who also cared and could play the game. I've never been that good at playing the game. Too honest. Well, I don't think before I speak So I would ask questions.

I'm, I think I'm too curious. So you kind of alluded to some of the origin story of your fascination or interest in observability. your boss has said, you know, if, if it's broken, if I don't find out about it, then, you know, everyone's fired. and that's, the thing for me.

Like I've had that experience of, the CEO, like emailing on the weekend, like, why didn't this thing work and being like, Oh no. And, having my boss be like, well, this, is not a good day for Justin. I was like, yep, it's not. and I don't ever want that to happen.

And I say that to my team too, like if something's broken, like we need to know about it. Before anybody else. And so that we can let the business know rather than the business letting us know. so I think we all feel like emotionally why it's important, but, what else like convinced you that this was like a business problem that really needed solving.

I'm going to come back to Gary Kamakawa again, he and, his partner who was amazing, they were definitely someone who felt like we are standing up something very hard and very novel. Bye. And so you need to know the metrics that we want to measure it against. And if you're not there yet, if they are all at a fail, like what does world class look like and how do we strive to get there?

and where are we and what progress are we making? Because if we can't be real honest about that, we're never going to get there. And so your goal is improvement. Your goal isn't perfect out of the gate.

That was something that really, really stuck with me. especially salespeople, right? A salesperson is never going to admit that something was an object failure. And I think marketers always want to put a good spin on things as well.

and so I think as ops people. It was really hard to kind of transition into a place of it's not about the thing being perfect. And my not being represented as being perfect. It's about giving everybody ultimate.

Transparency because again, if ops is the goal of being efficient and scalable. If something's broken and people can't do their job and you don't tell them everyone's being inefficient. And so that transparency truly enable scale and efficiency and so that everyone can be focused on moving on to something that they could accomplish today or creating a workaround or taking lunch early while we fix the problem so that. There's not 15 people independently spotting a problem and trying to solve it independently, or God thinking a campaign didn't work when in fact the, tracking stopped on our UTM's And that kind of transparency, can also be dangerous, like engineering teams provide, you know, uptime and SLA's and rely, and they're, they're used to that, like marketing ops teams are not used to that.

Have you found anyone feeling either threatened or resistant to the notion of more transparency, more observability? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We are actually thinking about doing a campaign where like we target ads to everyone in the company saying, if you use stack moxie, you will see failures. That's a good thing. Your team is taking ownership or something. Like, how do we educate executives to understand that when you start getting better quality in place, you're going to find things.

And the goal is to communicate them. we had a vendor that God bless and 6 months had 3 major outages that impacted our product. it was just the sign in. So our product was still working, but we chose to communicate at the moment.

We knew. and all 3 instances, the companies. uptime monitor on their software said they were up and in Twitter, they had no reported issues, but we knew it was down. and so we reported it to all of our customers, and it's not blaming the company that's down.

We chose that software vendor. And if we have downtime, we have downtime and I had 3 investors ping me about the quality of our team because we put our investors on those notifications as well. If they want to be on it. And so it's hard.

Like, people are not used to getting notified when there's a slowdown. it's the double edged sword, right? I think something's wrong with my system because I'm getting told something's wrong with the system, but it's a value we have to live. If we ever want marketing to get a little better, the other problem is, is we're partnered with all of these marketing operations and sales operations tools.

and they are awful. At admitting when things are broken and telling us those things. And so, just like in business, I wind up calling out a bunch of our partners who are crazy about all the time. And they're incredible tools and they're better than the alternative, but we're totally calling them out that some of them have.

Sub 90 uptime on certain pods. Right. And so no partner wants that. you know, kind of like the classic thing that When you make a mistake, but you recover, it can actually be better for you than if you didn't actually make the mistake because you have like more positive sentiment associated with the recovery.

I also think it's just the right thing to do, but like, we have an issue, I announce it, I say, here's what's going on. Ownership, here's our plan for mitigation, communicate, communicate, communicate. It's resolved. And like, you obviously have to pick and choose when that sort of thing is warranted as otherwise you kind of annoy people.

But, I tend to think that works well and actually makes you look better than if you're just like, no, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Like ignore the smoke coming out of the kitchen. Like we're okay.

do you feel that that kind of mentality Is the, is the industry moving in that direction? Well, I think those are the people who are getting promoted and getting the strategic roles, the people who are willing to do that and can communicate consistently and effectively and save the rest of the organization from a bunch of headache. I mean, it's the reason I knew everyone in the organization enough to figure out where the bodies were buried because if something was broken, even my first job at MTV, um, I got promoted on my very 2nd gig to running the venue because there were a bunch of really cool people in bands who work there, but I would always be sitting in the office and would answer the phone.

And so Madison Square Garden would start asking for me over my boss because they could always get me and I would run around and go figure it out. Right? so if you communicate, Okay. And you're transparent, people learn to trust you and then they task you with more.

And especially if you've turned down things you're not competent at and capable of, they'll almost demand that you then figure out how to take those things on. it's also a really great way to get visibility. Brent Kaiser, who is brilliant, who, built the marketing operations function at, bank of Hawaii, one of our amazing customers. Our goal was on his monthly report for people not to feel like they needed to read it, that they knew if something was wrong, that, they would be notified.

And so that monthly report, like, if they ever needed to go back and look at it, the data was there, but that they felt so comfortable, they could ignore those emails. It's a great philosophy. I look at it like a Gantt chart and a proposal deck. Nobody actually looks at the Gantt chart.

They don't care. It's never right. But somehow having it, there's like a comfort, you know, like you trust that this, whoever prepared it has things under control. it's evidently the slide that investors always go to is the market bigger than 5 billion dollars.

Yes. All right, let's move forward. Like, they don't have any idea what went into it, but is this Wacky founder thinking they can build a 5 billion company. Great.

One of the challenges I see with justifying, tech for revenue observability as an expense is that no one thinks they really need it until they do. you don't think you need insurance until you have an accident kind of thing. And probably with bigger companies who are more risk averse, it's maybe easier. but it's, hard.

And I see it as a smaller company where it's like, well, am I going to like invest time in that, or am I going to invest time in X it's a really hard sell. How have you found that bringing this solution to market? My biggest insight. I don't know if any of y'all know Steven Dunstan.

So he's leading all of our revenue functions. he's really funny. He and I are so super aligned on how we want to go to market. our investors keep asking us to hire like SDRs and salespeople.

And I'm like, Oh, I just, I just can't bring myself to do it. and he's like, look, Starting a company is hard enough. We can at least respect ourselves and, and, you know, not be the people out there doing that. he's someone that I'm very, very aligned with and he, has done a really great job of helping us realize that marketing ops people, like people who are in the day to day and the management are very worried about time savings.

which if you ask any VC investor or any sales guy, like time savings is the least important virtue, but a marketing ops person, because everything is so manual, that is their currency. That is our most important thing. And their boss could give a shit, right? Like, sorry, Justin, if you need to spend an extra 10 hours a week to do it your way, do it your way.

So The hard thing for us has been helping even our incredibly smart marketing ops people who are early adopters not sell their bosses on the thing that mattered to them, but sell their bosses on the thing that mattered to their boss. cause like we do GDPR privacy compliance. Most people could get that sent through procurement and six minutes flat. They don't really care.

They know they have to do it. they care that it's done. Right. But that's the extent of it.

What they really care about is putting a really dynamic automated QA in the hands of their marketer. Um, so that they don't have to do the QA and there's not a 48 hour turnaround on them doing the QA on their marketer's back. The CMO or the data privacy guys, like do the QA, so plan it earlier, get it out on time. Who cares?

Right? Like if you have to do that, you have to do that, but it's the, well, we can't check it and have third party verifiable logs. If we don't have a third party tool doing these things that check for the GDPR privacy. So he's been amazing at helping figure out.

That there are different audiences that need different messages. So you almost have to, and I don't mean this in a negative sense, but you almost have to Trojan horse some of the benefits within, other benefits that are also true, but that are more like business oriented. Because I completely agree with you. No one cares about saving RevOps time.

Like we wish they did, but really low on the company priority list. Even where saving that time would be, you know, objectively helpful to the business. Yeah, they don't get it. So they can't care, and I think that's the other big challenge we have in our industry is there is no CMO who really gets it, who can therefore help us be better at our jobs.

Like, we're having to figure it out on our own and thank God for you because, you know, you and our communities and we're trying to partner with each other. We're lifting each other up and it's really, really hard. but your CMO isn't going to be like, Hey, have you ever thought about the fact that you're running? The most expensive technology investment in our company, and you're running it like a marketing campaign.

Meanwhile, there are 17 people on DevOps running our cloud services, and we're spending 20, 30 percent less as a company on that. And that's the entire backbone for our whole product. and so when you start to realize this is every dollar of revenue and the most expensive piece of technology at our company, it puts a different light on how you should be focusing on managing that infrastructure. I see on your website as well, you talk about monitoring AI implementations, you know, I've, I've used StackMoxie in the past.

I'm familiar with lots of what you do, but this is a newer thing. And is this, I know it is obligatory. You probably have to include it in your term sheets that you will mention AI on your home page. every size company has to do it now.

But, what's the deal there? Like, how do you, you see observability as it relates to AI? I think it's what makes AI possible in all sales and marketing. one of our technology leader for the last year is a guy named Sev Garriskin.

and he is very passionate. the AI alignment issue. And so if you think about Skynet and the Terminator and what happens, it's where AI realizes that humans are the problem. they task AI with saving the planet and they realize humans are the problem.

And so the machines start to eradicate humanity. It's a misalignment. when AI is deployed in customer service chat, half the time we see it trying to make the end user happy. As opposed to solving the problems in alignment with the company's goals.

And so he spent the last year helping us figure out how to build these basic functions, and now he's off, to start a new company to literally prevent the Skynet thing. He is trying to solve AI alignment for the betterment of humanity. So I've been really lucky to have him in my life. but when you think about that, Deploying a I, you have to make sure it's aligned with your brand aligned with your goals integrated with the technology that needs to feed it in order to just work.

so all the different things we can do where we can. ingest your brand guidelines, and then check to make sure that the color on your landing page is the right color. Or when you have a chat conversation with someone, you want to make sure that the chat answer comes back, with the truth. Or what you would expect it to do or what a salesperson would say.

and we've always been able to look at chat. We've always been able to test against these dynamic variables being pulled from Salesforce or whatever system. so bringing that all together is kind of the backbone of AI theoretically working. and so think the other side of that coin is 60 percent of investments in AI applications have been going to sales and marketing functions.

And if you read how developers are thinking about using AI in their life, the thing is, you write a prompt. Then you write a validation test to make sure the prompt worked. don't have any of that validation testing. when you're trying to get a new app through to procurement, procurement's like, how do we know it's going to work?

How do we know it's not going to drift? How do we know it's not going to hallucinate? our tool can do all that testing. So I think it's a great moment for critical thinkers like you and I in RevOps as AI is being deployed.

It's also the complex versus the complicated problem. Once AI is involved, it becomes unknowingly complex. We could do something complicated manually, but once you add AI into that mix, generative AI, it becomes unknowingly complex. You can only test it automatically.

So just like, let's say a simple integration test lead fills out a form. Do they make it into salesforce? We can use technology to check other technology. Okay.

are you using AI to check other AI, like basically having prompts to check the output of, of other prompts? Right now our product, the AI is actually being used for us to build integrations. So that's how A. I.

Is being deployed today. we also have some A. I. Functions where we can check alignment with, like, brand values or things like that, in A.

I. The goal for what's next is to be able to use natural language to have this chat conversations to check as many variables as possible. So it would be a I running. The chat engagement on our side with the AI chat on the website say, so we're going to Acme Corp, and they've got a customer service chat on their website ours would be using natural language to submit questions.

25 different ways. And then using natural language, generative AI to validate that those answers are what they should be against sources of truth. Super interesting. so I'm gonna talk a little bit about your journey as a founder.

A little bit of what led you to start, like, what are some of the challenges, in doing this? Is it a good idea, to start a company? and how do you see that going? to start a company.

Yes. I think that is a good idea. I think people who are wired like you and I, can figure out the skills that we need to like kind of be successful in running a company. And I, don't like being the face person.

I'm not someone who enjoys. Public speaking. I used to say my dream job was to be the chief of staff for a senator on like judiciary or something like that in the Senate. now, actually, I'd love to be chief of staff.

Hey, so you can publish this. This is my application. I want to be chief of staff for who's ever going to run that, like, subcommittee on technology. For the U S Senate, right?

how do we get all the information in and make really good decisions? But I don't want to have to be the person who like ask kisses and raises money. so the business I picked to build, unfortunately, this business, the problem I was passionate about solving requires integrations. And so if you think about how Salesforce has been so dominant in the market, by having the app exchange all of these integrations.

And so it's almost impossible to replace salesforce because people have customized it and have all these integrations that make it do what they need it to do. so stack moxie is very similar. Whoever wins this category, as evidenced by New Relic and Datadog is going to be the company that has people building integrations against the technology someday. AI makes that a little less true, but nonetheless, likely.

And so my business is always going to be venture backed. It's going to be who will crown the winner of this market. and so for someone like me, where I want to know what world class is and I want to work towards it. So that's being number 1 under category who's insanely competitive.

It means I am always going to have to have venture capital to do this. And someone who's as unfiltered as I am. Venture capital might not always be the easiest thing to do. So it takes a special kind of VC to appreciate me.

venture capital brings strings. Now you've got board members to answer to. You've got questions. It introduces.

Almost like the enterprise dynamic in some ways where you have like other considerations beyond just those that you see as the pure pursuits of the business, to take into account. So that's, that's a hard pill for some people to swallow. I'd imagine Well, we've turned down more VC money than we've taken. that definitely is something that helps, um, because what I'm unwilling to do, the big one they always want is for us to hire a ton of SDRs and I'm like, Our customers would hate us.

we have an incredible reputation. We need to find better ways of getting out into the market for sure. But it's not SDRs to marketing ops people. It's just not.

there's a point in our current timeline where someone like injected a mind virus into every VC where the answer to every question is like hire a bunch of SDRs. I don't know how, where, how this happened. percent, here's my theory. SaaS is like a bond model.

And so they're trying to make it a predictable payback. And so, that's the mind virus is they're trying to make everything predictable. So if we hire this many SDRs, then here's the formula we have in our projection of how much revenue we're gonna do, So when I realized that they had a formula, they wanted to apply to us, I would turn down their money. Cause there's not a formula, we're going to discover what our customers need.

we're also going to give them more value than we charge them every single time. Like half of the investors we've talked to are like, you need to triple your prices. And I'm like, we will triple our prices when they get 10 X the value. we're trying to educate people on the market and give them value, not gouge them because VCs want to see an immediate return on their money.

So if you don't realize this is a massive category, that's the underpinning of AI. and we can do it with low costs and just making our customers successful, then you're not the right investor, which means it's been not fun for me. Every role has its drawbacks. Nothing's perfect.

but it's good to know that at least there are, uh, VCs out there that you, you have found that you were willing to partner with and that who may be, we're less susceptible to the myofirms. Servin Ventures, Neeraj, our partner at Servin, Swan Ventures here in Seattle and Kirby at Ascend. They're amazing. Um, and we have a ton of other incredible angels and investors as well.

So we are so incredibly lucky. so it unfortunately makes it even harder to add a new VC It's great sitting down with you, uh, MH, and it has been a lot of fun just watching your journey, uh, from the sidelines over the past few years, because I've, uh, You've been aware of and like using your tool in some early iterations in my past role. So rooting for you, folks, we will include a link to stack moxie in the show notes, but it's stack moxie. com.

Go check it out. Uh, you can create an account, play around, uh, and it can do a lot of cool things for you. M. H.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. You're amazing. Thank you so much for having me.