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12 Sept 2025 The Logan Bartlett Show EP 150: Bret Taylor (CEO, Sierra): A New Class of Software Winners
“I think part of the reason that there's price compression for tools like Zoom or Slack and Teams is in part because the value you get from a sort of horizontal productivity tool is very hard to measure.”
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- 12 Sept 2025
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- The Logan Bartlett Show
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…few areas that are obviously going to be impacted by AI, software engineering, customer service, content marketing, visual effects industry. There's probably others, different than the legal industry. And as a consequence, you know, it's not like, I got this great idea. Hey, if I told you, oh my gosh, AI for customer service, it's not the concept is obvious. The question is, do you have the right product? Do you have the right good market model? That's what I mentioned, the ink to me, Google thing, you B2B or you B2C. What is the packaging? What is the form factor that will become dominant? And so as a consequence, it's an intensely competitive time. Just like my recollection of the .com era is. And I think that's really interesting. So you have very clear markets with very intense competition. And that's different than other markets. You know, I think in the mobile phone came out, some of those categories like ride sharing wasn't like a self evident market. And then there was a couple great insights and created the ubers and the lifts of the world. I think right now, many of the biggest markets are already known. And as a consequence, one of our company values is actually competitive intensity, which is unusual. And it's the first line of that as we know we're not entitled to our success. And I think it's a really important part of being successful in this era. We're a bricks down. I think it's shifted the landscape of what is a software company. I love the example of Harvey is a company I really admire. I can't think of like a great legal tech company. I'm sure there are a couple. I don't mean that in a backhanded way towards any of them. But it wasn't like as you went through the top 10 enterprise software companies in public markets. There's not one in legal tech, right? There's ERP systems and CRM systems and all these others. It's just not one of the key categories. In part, because the tam for selling productivity enhancement to lawyers is not that big. But now all of a sudden with Harvey, you're actually doing the work and doing the antitrust review. All of a sudden the total dressable market looks huge because the addressable market of legal advice and legal labor is actually quite large. So that's really interesting to me because I think the traditional perception of where there are addressable markets in software I think has been upended because agents aren't simply productivity enhancements for people, but actually doing a job. As a consequence, I think how you evaluate the value of a piece of software starts to move away from traditional software productivity metrics. Think about a CIRA agent that actually makes a sale for you. The way you would value that is not really even related to AI or software. The way you'd value it is basically one of the margins on that sale. What would be the commission you'd pay a person to make that sale? And so as a consequence, I think it really has dramatically shifted the traditional view of how to value software, just as either a venture capitalist or an economist, it's really changed the markets. And I think I'm excited for that. I think it's going to be a really positive thing for w of how to value software, just as either a venture capitalist or an economist, it's really changed the markets. And I think I'm excited for that. I think it's going to be a really positive thing for industry. The other great thing is I can dub over you saying Harvey and slice and LaGoura for the totality of that. And so we don't have to give any plugs to, you know, to hearty throughout this. It's a great market. No, it's a great example too, though. I'm curious, like one of the things that I've thought about with your example, and I'd be curious what you think of this is like, this some extent, the outcome-based pricing in general is so demonstrable ROI. And it's very clear what people are willing to pay for it in some ways. And also, you're somewhat beholden to alternatives in some ways. And so I think about what value I get from Zoom. And if Zoom was the only thing that existed in the world, I don't know. We could probably get Red Point to pay $10 million for it or something, right? Just because it's like that impactful to our day to day. But they don't get to charge that because there's teams and there's Google Meet and there's there's other stuff like that. And so I guess as you think about outcome-based pricing for your business or for Harvey and LaGoura, like doing work in that way, is there any framework or like how do you think price pressure plays out in some ways when there are these alternatives that can exist? Do you think that it ends up eroding some of the the ROI pricing that you can get in the early days? I have a slightly different way of thinking about it, but I'll try to answer your question directly too. You can reject my question. No, it's like really obnoxious. That's a different question. I think part of the reason that there's price compression for tools like Zoom or Slack and Teams is in part because the value you get from a sort of horizontal productivity tool is very hard to measure. If you just think about running a 120,000-person company that's a global company, you're paying per seat for something like a Zoom or a Slack or something. It's sort of funny because you're paying the same value per seat for like the most sophisticated research and development engineer and like the new grad in your pick the least strategic department of whatever that company does. As a consequence, I think when you're thinking of horizontal software, whether it's productivity software, communication software, you end up with pricing that is somewhat commoditized and there are some rare exceptions where companies are able to charge premium. In contrast, if you look at the enterprise software market that are oriented towards departments, say service now for ITSM or Salesforce or CRM or SAP for ERP systems, the value that those companies derive per seat for their application is traditionally much larger, usually more than an order of magnitude of software like Zoom, even though many fewer people use it, but it's closer to business value. You know the value of balancing your company's ledger and auditing your financials before earnings call, you know the value of a sale. As a consequence, the business value you're selling is more alue. You know the value of balancing your company's ledger and auditing your financials before earnings call, you know the value of a sale. As a consequence, the business value you're selling is more measurable, it's closer to that business value. The analogy I would give for outcomes based as we're going from impression ads to CPC ads and one way of looking at outcomes based pricing that I don't agree with is you're leaving money on the table. That would be like making a modern, you know, cost per click ads auction saying you're leaving impressions on the table. And that's not the way anyone thinks about anymore, just because history is played out and the value has accrued towards CPCs and cost per conversion now for modern ad networks. I think in the sort of digital economy, the closest you can get to a measurable accountable outcome, the more value will accruate your platform. And so going back to your question, we'll competition cause price compression probably, but I think in general, you know, the closer you are to really valuable business outcome, the more your platform will be valued relative to the value of that business outcome, as opposed to being compared to another piece of technology. And so, you know, it's interesting, I'm not sure what outcomes based would be for Zoom because you'd have to describe the value to every single video call you have. And I'm sure some are quite important when you're, you know, closing a huge deal and some are totally trivial. And that's just not easy. In serious business, we help build AI agents for customer experience and you know your cost per contact in your call center and you know the cost savings that an AI agent could drive, you know, the value of a new product sale and if your AI agent helps make that sale, just like, you know, how much, you know, you pay a salesperson for doing that, you know, how much is valuable it is to your agent. And as a consequence of being really close to that value, I think it's a really natural way to charge for it. And for companies, it means they can model this not proportional to sort of the cost of a technology, but proportional to the value that they're getting as a business. The thing I think will happen, which is a mix of competition and technology adoption is a lot of AI agents now are being compared to their human counterparts, whether it's labor costs or effectiveness, in a market like software engineering or customer service in area that you know, perhaps like you know, conventional wisdom as AI agents will come to be dominant parts of this industry. You have to imagine that in 10 years you'll start comparing agents to other agents and then only to a whole sorts of differences, you know, the cost won't be comparing to labor costs, you'll be comparing it to inference costs, but the effectiveness will presumably be different. And I think the thing people often missed are second order effects. So just going back to Sierra's business, I think a lot of people think about AI agents for customer experience and they think call center automation. And that's true. And you know, the phone call costs $20 today and…
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