Annie Pearl: preference

Transcript context

…Before Calendly, you were at Box. Before that, you were at Glassdoor. I'm going to ask two different questions. You could pick which direction you want to go. What would you say are the biggest differences culturally between these three? If you had to bucket, here's how I'd describe Glassdoor, Box, Calendly. Or what did you take from those two places that you bring with you to Calendly and future opportunities? I love this question. So, they're all different, which is why I just feel so fortunate to have had experiences that were all quite different. So, starting with Box, maybe I'll take your second question. Box, when I joined, we were in the process of moving up market and trying to capture as much enterprise market share as possible, and I was on the enterprise product management team. So, I spent a lot of time, as I mentioned earlier, talking to customers. And in my first year in particular trying to ramp on the business. And I'd say my biggest learning during that time was around how to ask the right questions to really understand the why behind what a customer was asking for and then figuring out how to build a solution to their problem that would also meet the needs of a broader swath of customers. It became very clear early to me if I would just go build what customer A wanted and what customer B wanted and the customer C wanted, not only would that be wasted effort to do it three times, but more importantly, what they wanted me to go build was going to have a negative impact on the end user experience. And preserving that end user experience was so critical. So, learning how to ask the right questions to understand the actual problem and then build the solution that's going to be most scalable to that problem set across lots of customers was probably my biggest learning from Box. Moving to Glassdoor, totally different business model. Glassdoor is actually really more of a consumer business and 60 million unique users go to Glassdoor every month and it's a marketplace between job seekers and employers and it's highly, highly dependent on the consumer engagement, growing traffic, getting that traffic to come and engage and apply to jobs. And so, during my time as CPO there, I was responsible now for both sides of that marketplace, the consumer business and the B2B. And so, I learned all about how do you build PR consumer products, how do you think about optimization of a funnel? How do you think about building up a growth team and growth as a discipline? How do you use data and AB testing to make decisions? So, I think that kind of consumer mentality and how you approach product, I then have brought with me to Calendly, which is really a blend of both, right? Calendly is first, as we've talked about a PLG business and it looks a lot more like a consumer business like Glassdoor. And then, it's got this direct selling business that looks a lot more like Box's enterprise business. So, I think I've been able to take kind of lessons learned from both Box and Glassdoor and apply them together to Calendly. What a cool set of experiences. I'm trying to imagine you using all three in the same day. Sending a Calendly, storing your files in a Box and looking at reviews...…

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