Craig Walker: From Garage to Global - Dialpad’s Channel Growth

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers, we're here at channel partners event, and it's, it's crazy. It's really good, taking off like crazy. A bunch of

Craig Walker  0:10  
people, yeah, it's jumping. It's great energy. Yeah, yeah. So,

Chip Rodgers  0:13  
so excited to be joined today by Craig Walker. And Craig is co founder and CEO of Dialpad, and Dialpad is just doing fantastic these days. Just, you're, you started the company 14 years ago and and it's just now, you're, what, 1400 employees, and just fantastic taking off, great growth.

Craig Walker  0:40  
Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, I still remember when it was four people in my pool house in the backyard, that it's 14 people, 1400 people around the world with offices in seven different countries. It's, it's pretty amazing to look back and see what's happened

Chip Rodgers  0:59  
that's, that's exciting and and really gratifying. You know, I love to chat a little bit about, you know, some of the you can't have a conversation in technology without talking about AI. And I know you guys are have put a lot into your AI capabilities. Tell me a little bit about that and how customers are reacting.

Craig Walker  1:19  
Yeah. So thanks for that, yeah. So when we started the company, me and my co founders used to run the Google Voice product, and so what we really want to do is leave Google and build or take what we had built for consumers in the Google Voice product and really make the next gen, ultimate modern service for enterprises and but along the way, that was the journey. That's what we're still doing. But in 2018 I got a demo of a real time AI company whose focus was on business conversations. It was called Talk IQ was backed by Salesforce, and in the middle of their demo, of them simulating a sales call, it was literally checking off topics that were covered and questions asked and question answered. And I'm like, it was a one of those moments of like, okay, not only do we need to build the best, most integrated, beautiful, easiest to use, delightful, highest quality product, but now we got to be able to understand the conversation and what's actually happening in the product in those calls. And so we straight away went out and acquired that company, brought that team in, added a lot of that team, built that into the core of our offering. And so now, since 2018 any conversation you're having on Dialpad, we're understanding it in real time. We're able to determine sentiment, we're able to suggest next best steps, and then when the eugenic open AI thing came about, we were able to then build our own generative AI model. And so we have a much better cost advantage, much better quality advantage, much better speed advantage, because it's running on our stuff and and it's much safer because most of your data staining inside a dial pad versus going out to third party. And so it's one of those things where the kind of the the cloud communication, enterprise market, got a big boost from COVID. Obviously, you had to work from anywhere. That's what we were built for from day one. And then this real time AI being able to coach and make people better at their jobs. We were six years ahead on that. And then all of a sudden, you know, open, AI comes out. So I feel like we've been blessed pretty well on a couple big segment mover industry shifts that that really played into where we were. That's

Chip Rodgers  3:43  
amazing. So you, your team was already, like, you said, six years ahead as soon as chat GPT came out. So now everybody's trying to you're like, we got this. We've been doing it.

Craig Walker  3:53  
Yeah, it's funny how quickly everyone else in the industry instantly changes their websites and starts saying the exact same things, but there's a real difference in quality and difference of how you approach things, of having core, real, proprietary, native AI optimized for this specific task, versus hiring a bunch of prompt engineers who are just going to go ask GPT to chat GPT to tell it something. So it is. It's kind of hard looking at the messaging to tell the difference, but once you see the product and once you get a POC, if our sellers are doing a good enough job, we'll be, we'll be able to show the real difference.

Chip Rodgers  4:28  
That's amazing. That's amazing. So we are here at the channel partners event. Tell me a little bit about del pet. I know you guys work with a ton of partners, and they're really strategic to your success. Talk to me a little bit about what that means to doubt.

Craig Walker  4:44  
Yeah. So we've been heavily invested in the channel for a long time. Mike canes, our head of channel. He's fantastic. He's really built it into a really successful and growing organization, but we have, you know, a lot of traditional channel partners. Said, but you speak, used to be called Master agents, I guess are now TSDS and and all the advisors underneath them. But we also have a handful of strategic partners as well. T Mobile for business and Google are two of the biggest soft bank in Japan is another one, and in all three of those cases, both our sellers and their sellers work together to bring dial pad to both new and existing customers, and it's just a really nice in both Google and T Mobile for business, have representation on our board of directors too, and they're investors in the company, as is soft bank. They don't have the board seat, but they're also an investor, so we have just really great distribution partners and strategic partners as well as, you know, like the the TSDS and the channel I like, I come to this show every single year. It's my favorite show of the year, because every single person I meet with is out there amplifying the dial pad message and selling dial pad and getting their, you know, sub agents totally fired up on it. So it's, it's kind of like the Super Bowl of how to get to see them all in one place at one time. Yeah, that's terrific.

Chip Rodgers  6:08  
So how, what's the, what is the, the multiplier with, with partners? It's, you know, clearly, you know, geography industry, like, what are the, where are the places that partners help, help you grow.

Craig Walker  6:22  
So we have our own direct sales team as well. We have an inside sales team. We have, you know, a Field Sales Team for larger enterprises. But it is the multiplication that you get from the channel partners of they know when there's a live deal out there, right? So every time a channel brings you into a deal, there's a deal happening like it's in flight, although there'll be other providers in there and you gotta outshine them, it's at least a real deal that's happening. Whereas, you know, marketing based lead, or, you know, self sourced by a seller, there may or may not be an actual initiative happening, right then. So having much more qualified, much more qualified, you know, it's, it's a real project, and it's going to happen, and now you just have to outshine the other folks and win the business. So it is, it is a real big multiplier. And by the way, we have a pretty healthy size sales team. But you know, there's 5000 plus, you know, agents out there selling dial pad, and so, I mean, that's a level of scale that I'm never going to reach anytime soon. So it's just, it just is a true force multiplier of how to get to alpad into everyone's hands and at least educate the market on everything we're doing, yeah,

Chip Rodgers  7:40  
that's terrific. What this week? What are your What are your plans, any you know, meeting, obviously, with partners and customers, any announcements or anything that you want to share,

Craig Walker  7:52  
not Well, we did a, I had a keynote this morning where we talked about, kind of, how do you have a future proof AI contact center solution, because there really are two camps emerging in the space. One is traditional providers basically saying, trust us, we're going to be the best solution for you, and we're going to make your agent smarter by our integrated AI. And then there's this whole group of like newly funded Silicon Valley backed startups that are saying you don't need any agents anymore, we're going to do it all with a genetic AI and AI powered robots. So you're going to save a ton of money on humans, and it's just going to be so much better for everyone. And the truth is somewhere in between those two. But our entire approach is we're going to be the provider that is able to provide that entire spectrum. It's a future proof platform. If you have a complicated solution, they'll never be, never be, you know, offloaded to an agent, you know, 100% AI agent, awesome. We have the best solution for you. If you have a very specific use case that you don't need humans to answer the same question a million times over. Awesome. We have the perfect solution for you. And if you're somewhere on that journey in between. We have that solution too. So that's really been, been our focus as a company and the products we're developing. But it's a very real it's very real quandary for a lot of people, because they're like, What do I do? You know, it's for buyers, what do I do for channel partners? What do I sell? And for our competition, how do we cover that, that surface area? You know, we're pretty excited about already having that built in, and being able to provide that whole future proof solution.

Chip Rodgers  9:30  
That's fantastic. Craig, thank you so much. We just came from your dial pad space, and it was hopping. A bunch of bunch of people, customer meetings, a lot of things happening. So congratulations on the tremendous growth and and success of the op ed, this idea that started in in your garage, yeah,

Craig Walker  9:49  
yeah, yeah, it was. It's come a long way over, over the last 14 years, for sure. But thanks so much for chatting with me. Thank

Chip Rodgers  9:57  
you, Craig. Appreciate it, and thank you all for joining. Morning, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

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