đ§đ Inside Serval: The System of Intelligence for IT | Jake Stauch
Serval just announced a $75M Series B led by Sequoia. Six months earlier, they didn't know if the company was going to work.
This is one of my favorite recent episodes of the podcast.
I get into the weeds with Jake Stauch at Serval on building an AI-native product and what itâs like going up against publicly traded incumbents.
Thereâs 4x more people working in IT support than software engineering, and we talk about why IT departments havenât had much automation historically, how Serval built what can only be described as âvibe coding for the IT help deskâ, and the single question they asked customers that led them to the idea.
Jake also opens up about navigating the first 12+ months with no customers, why they never pivoted from building a full platform from the start, building a mirror instead of a system of record, how they structured early design partnerships that actually converted, raising a Series B in one day after announcing the Series A, and the importance of increasing talent density as you scale a company.
Iâm also trying something new. You asked for clips of the episodes in these emails, and Iâm including a few below. Let me know what you think (and follow + like + reply on Twitter and LinkedIn for the algorithms bless your feed with more!)
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Timestamps to jump in:
0:14 AI-native employee support
5:15 How an early work trial almost ended the entire company
9:05 Why IT hasnât had much automation
13:09 Vibe coding for IT professionals
15:31 Competing against publicly traded incumbents
23:32 Having less than three months of runway for seven years building his first consumer health hardware startup
33:15 Lessons from five years at Verkada
39:11 The single question that birthed the idea for Serval
44:19 Navigating 12+ months of zero revenue
52:05 Knowing when not to pivot
55:15 Finally landing the first three customers
58:07 Getting pre-empted for a Series A
1:01:04 Getting a Series B term sheet the next day
1:05:54 How to structure design partnerships that convert
1:08:48 Building a mirror instead of system of record
1:13:49 Make the implementation part of the product
1:15:24 How to increase talent density as you scale
1:21:32 Why every new hire should help you recruit
Referenced:
Find Jake on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
Clips
âThereâs 4x more IT support professionals than software engineersâ
âAI companies should build a mirror AND a system of recordâ
âHow to structure early design partnerships that actually convertâ
âThe day we announced our Series A, I got a text form Sequoia. âCome to our office.ââ
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Stauch:
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, Iâm excited. I know weâre going to talk a lot of fun stuff. Can you, really quick, for people who donât know Serval, really quick, just give us an explanation of what it is?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. Basically, itâs an AI platform for employee support. Iâm sure folks are familiar with all these cool AI tools for customer support. We support employees internally, so when you go in and you ask questions internally, you need help maybe resetting a password, getting access to an application. A lot of times, thatâs IT related. We often start with IT teams, but more broadly we can support internal questions around, âHey, I need to make this update to my benefits,â or, âI need an employment verification letter,â or, âI need this expense approved,â or âSend an NDA to a customer.â So all the kind of internal questions, we have an AI platform to automate those resolutions and we make it very easy for the admins on the other side of that to build those automations.
Turner Novak:
When you say âyou make it easy,â what is it like today? If Iâm not using Serval, if Iâm using a market tool thatâs out there, is it not easy?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. The traditional way of internal support, whatâs called in the category like âenterprise service managementâ or âIT service managementâ is you make your request. You often file a ticket or you make a request in a chat platform and then it creates a ticket for you. That ticket sits in somebodyâs queue, eventually it gets assigned to a human. That human might reassign it to somebody else, tag somebody, and it just becomes this ticket that moves through the system. And eventually, hopefully, you get a resolution, but meanwhile youâre kind of just stuck around waiting. Our ideal experience is you ask for help, you get help immediately. All thatâs automated.
Turner Novak:
Why wasnât that a thing? Because that seems pretty straightforward. I donât know.
Jake Stauch:
If you want to make employee support, great. You have to automate the requests. The challenge is building those automations. Thereâs all these great automation tools that are out there. Obviously, thereâs these cool drag-and-drop workflow builders. No end to those kinds of tools. Theyâre everywhere and theyâre very powerful. But you think about the problem here is, you have to go in, you have to say, âOkay, what triggers this event? Okay, what the rule is. If this, then that. Drag this, drop that,â maybe add some custom scripting. And so you can build cool stuff, but thereâs so much friction in building the automation.
Thereâs so much friction in maintaining that because things change over time, things break down, that you just donât end up automating all that much because itâs easy to do a lot of these tasks. These tasks only take five, 10, 15, max like 30 minutes in many cases, and so youâre just going to do that if the alternative is going into one of these massive drag-and-drop workflow builders and building out something that might never give you an ROI. Instead, we took this very different approach where you basically vibe code automations, you describe what you want to automate in natural language and the automation just appears for you.
Turner Novak:
So what would be an example of, off the top of your head, something you might vibe code or vibe automate right now?
Jake Stauch:
Like reset Okta MFA factors. So youâre using Okta to log into your company. You get a new phone, youâre locked out and you want to get back in, and IT can go in and do this manually for you, but building a workflow that does that actually ends up being kind of complex because youâve probably got some security rules on who needs to approve it. Maybe certain teams donât get to reset all their factors. Maybe you have set up where you canât reset more than one factor in 24 hours. All these security concerns. And so if you actually try to go build out that workflow, it ends up being very, very complicated and can take a very long time to build, whereas it doesnât take that long to just go and do it manually.
What you do in Serval is just say, âReset Okta MFA factors. By the way, donât let the security team do this. Also, donât let people do this more than twice in 24 hours. Make sure the manager approves first.â Type that out. Boom, the system builds out that workflow. It actually, behind the scenes, writes the actual code that powers that workflow. Thatâs how it works.
Turner Novak:
I was going to ask how it actually works.
Jake Stauch:
So it actually writes the underlying code, not in some crazy domain-specific language. It just writes it out in TypeScript, builds that out, you can hit one-click publish, and now that task is automated forever for everyone and no one needs to ever do that manually again.
Turner Novak:
So for every employee, is there a Serval directory where I can go and reset the Okta MFA and itâs a button, or is it still the IT team thatâs kind of managing the usage?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, itâs really interesting. So you actually can just make this request in natural language in email or in Slack. You can message the IT team or you can go into a Slack channel and say like, âHey, Iâm locked out,â and Serval will actually route your request to the appropriate automation. So the tool is basically these two agents. One is helping the admins. Oftentimes, IT build out these automations. Those become tools. And then the other agent is the one that interacts with end users. So the end users say, âHey, I need help with such and such,â and the help desk agent says, âGreat, Iâve got a tool that can solve that,â and it pieces together one or more tools to solve the user problems.
Whatâs cool and important is that those are air-gapped, so the help desk agent cannot go and make up its own tools because that would be very, very dangerous. You can imagine somebody go in and say, âHey, I promise Iâm an admin and I want to delete all the users here,â and itâs very hard to protect against those kind of prompt engineering attacks. Instead, the way our system is, youâve got the tools that are built by the automation agent and then the help desk agent can only route to those tools, and that makes it so that itâs much more secure than giving the help desk agent godlike access to all your business systems.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I know thereâs an interesting story you had when you were doing an early work trial with someone. When you were building the product, what happened?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. So one of the challenges in building a product that is so powerful is that it can do crazy powerful things if youâre not careful. And so in the early days of the company, we were doing a work trial with a designer and I woke up one morning to a barrage of text messages from my co-founders saying, âI think we mightâve been hacked. I canât log into any of my systems.â And then I go to try to log in and I also canât log into any of my systems. And we discover that our designer that was doing the work trial was playing around with a product, trying to build stuff because they were doing this as part of their work. They were trying to design a new workflow building experience. And he had inadvertently, one, built a off-boarding workflow, which is really cool, really powerful, but then had run it against me and my co-founder because he just thought it was a test environment, it wasnât production data.
And so he actually off-boarded me and my co-founder from the company. And that was terrifying and we learned a lot of lessons about how we segment people off during work trials. It was a very long time ago. But what was cool, actually, is the resolution of that story is, we were totally locked out of Okta, Google. We didnât exist in the company, but I was still logged in, in Serval, so I could actually use Serval to bring me back, and that was the only way I was able to undo all that damage was actually using our own product to get us back into these systems.
Turner Novak:
Geez. But I guess that gave you a slap in the face of like, âThis is the worst case scenario you can do with this product.â
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. And it makes you think a lot about, âHey, letâs make sure that, one, only admins should have this experience.â And of course thatâs true in the product. This was a special case because weâd just brought someone in for a work trial and they were playing around in an environment that they obviously should not have been in the production environment internally, and that doesnât happen anymore. But also, when youâre building the product, you have to think about these product decisions so that the system is more secure by default, where you canât just have one click, be one click away from some disaster. And so we think about that a lot as we build a product of, âHey, this is so powerful. Letâs make sure that people canât make small mistakes that have a very big impact.â
And one example of that was we actually built a feature that we rolled back because we felt it was too powerful. The way our product works, as itâs described, is you can vibe code these automations, describe what you want to automate and do it. But what happens if somebody comes in with a request and you donât have an automation for it today, it just escalates it as a manual ticket. So if someone comes in and they say, âHey, I want to delete this user, off-board them from the system,â and we donât have an automation for that necessarily pre-built by the IT team, and so what ends up happening is that gets escalated and then somebody handles it manually. We thought, âYou know whatâd be really cool? Automatically build the automation for them and have it ready to go so that IT just needs to say, one click, âYes, run this automation.ââ
Turner Novak:
So this is before anyoneâs requested? Itâs pre-built, youâre saying?
Jake Stauch:
Itâs after the request comes in, but an automation has not been built for it yet.
Turner Novak:
Oh. So it makes it and then IT approves-
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. It approves it and it runs it automatically. So it says, âHey, this user asked for this other person to be off-boarded. Do you want to approve and run that automation?â And you could one click and approve it, and it worked and it was amazing, but when you thought about it, âMan, we are one click away from somebody saying something like, âHey, delete our entire AWS account-ââ
Turner Novak:
Delete the company.
Jake Stauch:
âDelete the company.â And our system would go and generate that workflow, and then youâre kind of one click away from disaster. Now, in practice, you would not expose the API scopes that make that possible. Thereâs all these protections before that would happen, but we were very uncomfortable with the idea that youâre one click away. So we rolled that back and instead made it so that we would suggest new automations to you automatically, but then youâd review and approve those automations, and then those would be used in future requests. So youâre not going to just automatically hit a button and then have something major happen.
Turner Novak:
Itâs interesting that this hasnât really become a thing until now because when you think of an IT professional, itâs like somebody who probably just loves technology, loves just the computer, loves the internet and all that stuff, and thereâs not that many automation tools for them. Itâs just not something that anyoneâs built yet. Do you know why we havenât built very good technology for IT professionals?
Jake Stauch:
There actually are a lot of automation tools, but they all look the same. Theyâre all these drag-and-drop workflow builders and every product has them, and a lot of IT folks do use them, but they end up only using them for these very complicated long-running processes because thatâs the only place that they can justify the upfront investment.
Turner Novak:
Like an overnight migrate a server, 12-hour-
Jake Stauch:
Or some part of the onboarding process or the operating process, things that take a very long time, because then you could potentially realize the gains from that automation. What you donât see a lot of automation for is the smaller and frankly the more common kinds of tasks because thereâs this questionable payoff. If the task only takes you 10 minutes to complete and the automation takes you a couple of weeks to build, youâre just never going to be able to prioritize building that automation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing I feel like youâve mentioned before is that a lot of automation isnât actually automation. What does that mean? Because itâs like an oxymoron.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. So itâs interesting when you think about how a lot of these systems think about automation, the automation will be, âHey, we automatically generated a ticket and we automatically assigned it to somebody,â and automated.
Turner Novak:
Still a lot of work to be done.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. And from a very legacy perspective, true. Those things used to take a lot of time. Someone wouldâve to go and take the user request and turn that into a ticket and fill out all these forms, and it is valuable to take a request and automatically generate the ticket, but that is not really the work to be done. And we really think about automation is, âNo, the userâs problem is solved, not weâve taken some steps in the software platform to automate pieces of the software journey.â
Turner Novak:
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So an interesting thing that you mentioned is youâre basic building the code. Did you have to go out and train your own models to do all this? Because when you look at these companies like Cursor or Codex, et cetera, pretty big undertakings, obviously they work pretty well, people use them. Is there APIs you can plug into that helps you do this? Did you have to build this all yourself? How did that go?
Jake Stauch:
We ended up building the entire agentic framework all ourselves internally. Now the models, we use off the shelf models, a lot of infrastructure around that to make that really reliable. We found that the models, especially in the latest generation, just performed so well that we havenât... We thought weâd need to train our model or fine-tune an existing model. That ended up not being necessary. And weâre less and less confident thatâs going to be an approach that we take. In the future, weâll see what happens.
Part of that is because the problem set is quite constrained. If you think about what weâre doing versus, say, a lovable or more generic vibe coding platform, we are building IT or enterprise service management automations. Generally, these are procedural scripts that are going and hitting a set of API endpoints with nicely documented public APIs. And so, yes, our system ingests all these public APIs. We have a good understanding of how these APIs work. We have examples of good automations that have been built. And the IT automations you want are generally, âDo this, then do this, try this,â and that kind of script or program is built very reliably by AI today.
Turner Novak:
Itâs all just rules-based, follow whatâs out there?
Jake Stauch:
Itâs rules-based. Thereâs, in the training set, right, in the corpora that these tools are trained on, thereâs just a lot of examples of this kind of code, and thereâs a lot less ambiguity about how youâd build these kinds of scripts versus using a vibe coding platform to build a SaaS application, which is challenging and has a lot of architecture considerations. Using a vibe coding platform to take a set of actions across a few different APIs, thatâs very reliable and everything weâve built to make that more and more reliable over time has really improved the product.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And itâs kind of an interesting market or space because as an outsider you might be like, âIT software, that canât be that big of a market,â but I think thereâs some publicly traded companies in the space. Theyâre some of the largest software companies. How big is the market? Do you know?
Jake Stauch:
The market is massive, and I had the same kind of impression, outside in, before we got deep in the space of, âIs there a big enough market for this?â Because I knew from my time at Verkada how big of a problem automation and IT service management was for our customers, but I didnât really understand the breadth and depth of this market. Obviously ServiceNow, one of the largest SaaS companies of all time, and this is predominantly what they do and their stock price has taken a hit. So this is out of date, but they were a 230 billion company last year and one of the biggest publicly traded SaaS companies in history. Theyâve taken a bit of a dive this year, maybe related to Serval, maybe not. Weâll see, but-
Turner Novak:
Just a coincidence.
Jake Stauch:
Just a coincidence. We announced our Series B and I think they lost 40% of their share price, but thereâs many things at play. Who knows?
Turner Novak:
Like WallStreetBets traders, âOh, my God, these guys are going bankrupt.â
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. They saw our video and theyâre like-
Turner Novak:
The launch video.
Jake Stauch:
... âSell. Sell, sell, sell.â
Turner Novak:
The launch video erased tests of hundreds of billion.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, itâs a massive space. And even smaller players in the space like Jira Service Management have a great business in ITSM. Freshservice has a great business in ITSM. So the category is quite massive. I mean, depending on the estimates, 12, 15 billion or more just in the IT service management software sector. I think whatâs interesting about Serval is we are not limited to the ITSM or enterprise risk management software space. Weâre actually going after the labor here because, yes, there are 10 billion, plus tens of billions spent on the software, but there are hundreds of billions spent on IT support and internal employee support. And thatâs really the space that we see us making a dent in is actually automating the work, not just building a better ITSM.
Turner Novak:
So then I feel like some people take that question like, âOh, youâre replacing jobs. People are losing jobs because of Serval.â Is that true necessarily, or youâre adding-
Jake Stauch:
Weâre not seeing that. We are replacing work but not jobs. And we are not seeing actual job reduction or job loss or rifts. What weâre seeing is, one, weâre enabling IT to be this kind of internal automation center for the organization. Weâre empowering really talented, smart IT folks to go and build workflows and automations for the broader company. And thatâs so cool to see them actually have tools where they can show off their capabilities. If you think about you work in IT support, how do you show that youâre amazing and youâre better than the person working next to you in IT support if most of what you do are these manual kind of click-ops-type work operations?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. But if your value is like, âI reset passwords,â thatâs kind of-
Jake Stauch:
Itâs hard to show off. Itâs hard to be better than your peer at resetting passwords. But if you have a tool like Serval, you become a builder. Youâre actually able to build these really creative complex workflows for onboarding, off-boarding, compliance, reporting, help desk. And so you really are enabling folks to show their value, and yes, you are replacing and eliminating a lot of the drudgery of the work, but youâre also enabling higher order kinds of work and making these people more impactful and more important and vital to the organization because they become the experts on these tools and they build automations for the broader organization. So weâre really excited about that trend and itâs been so cool to see our customers be elevated in their companies because they bring in a tool like Serval and they become the hero because they fixed all these problems at the company, and weâre not bogged down by just a barrage of tickets.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, itâs interesting. I think this is going to come up before I publish this episode with Gary Tan, YC, what we talk about. So firewood used to be 25% of US GDP. Did you know this?
Jake Stauch:
No.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs an insane stat. And it was literally in the 1700s. And even, I think, in the 1830s it was 26.3% of US GDP was the sale of firewood. Today, I donât even think it exists on... Itâs 0.1% or whatever. But itâs just so fascinating how the market does change-
Jake Stauch:
The market changes, the job changes.
Turner Novak:
... the economy does and will change. Yeah, and itâs based on technology like we just-
Jake Stauch:
A stat I saw that was really interesting is there are four times more people working in IT support than in software engineering. And so when you think about the impact of these tools for software engineers, thereâs four times more people working in IT support. And that sounds crazy if you live in the tech world, but then you think about, âOkay, think about retail and restaurants and manufacturing and healthcare. A whole lot of IT support folks running around, not a lot of software engineers.â And so it makes sense that IT support is just a much, much bigger part of the economy, and itâs been growing so quickly because everyone becomes an IT worker eventually. If you think about in the past, a lot of people did not interact with technology during the course of their day. Now there are very few jobs which donât interact with technology in some way, shape or form. And thatâs whatâs really created the boom in IT service management and internal IT support.
Turner Novak:
And itâs true. Itâs 2026 now. Holy shit. If youâre doing a job participating in the economy right now, you kind of have to use a computer-
Jake Stauch:
No matter what the job is. Youâre using a computer, youâre using a phone, at the very least youâre interacting with technology in some way thatâs vital to your job.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, even if youâre a truck driver. So the truck is technology, but also you might be using a phone, GPS coordinates, syncing-
Jake Stauch:
Logging, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, logging, syncing-
Jake Stauch:
Routing.
Turner Novak:
... what to drop off in the pickup. And then eventually, I was talking to my wife about this last night, she rode in a Waymo for the first time and her initial reaction was like, âThis is weird, also kind of cool.â But then also, âOh, man, what happens to all the people who are drivers?â Well, a truck like that, you still probably have a person in the truck. They just donât have to drive it. Thatâs hard. 18-hour trip across the country driving a super heavy, dangerous vehicle versus the computer kind of does it for you. It makes your job a lot easier.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. And thereâs so much work to do. I mean, I think that thatâs what it comes down to is that thereâs a backlog of jobs to be done and work to do that weâre just not doing because weâre stuck with all this other work. And itâs true in software engineering where weâre saying, âYes, even when you bring in these AI tools, turns out thereâs a huge backlog of demand for software engineering.â Same is true in pretty much every category where thereâs so much more we would be doing if we had the resources. And so even though weâre automating a ton of the work, thereâs still a lot behind that that needs to be done. And a lot of times thatâs more interesting work and thatâs what weâre enabling people to focus on.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because imagine if a decent chunk of your day is just sending people a link to reset their password or spending a bunch of time helping people spin up their operating environment, like the new laptop, it might get kind of old. It might be fun when you first start, but if youâre doing it for 20 years, it might be kind of cool to not spend as much time on that.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. As you said, these are people that have been interested in computers and technology a lot of times their whole lives. They got in this field because they find this stuff really fascinating. And then the actual job, the reality of the job, does not require their level of intelligence and expertise. And we like to say, âWe unlock the most meaningful parts of the job.â We unlock meaningful work instead of just focusing... Thereâs always this gap between the idealized version of what a job is and what the job actually is. And we think a lot of the difference between those two worlds is the kind of work that AI and tools like Serval are automating away.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And I want to talk about how you kind of came up with the idea. You were working in a company called Verkada, but even before that you had a startup you were in, I think. Did you go to Duke?
Jake Stauch:
Yep.
Turner Novak:
Yep. Okay. So just tell me the story about your very first startup.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I went to Duke. I worked in a neuroscience lab doing EEG, so reading brain waves, not invasively, with sensors, electrodes on the surface of the scalp. And my first job in college, work-study job, was my job was to look at the screen while people were in the lab doing some kind of test on the computer and look at their brainwaves and see when theyâre about to fall asleep, because I could see that in the brain activity, and then offer them a coffee or Coke because if they fell asleep, it ruined the experiment.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs actually pretty cool that you could do that.
Jake Stauch:
It was a good work-study job as an 19-year-old. It was like, âCool, Iâll watch the TV. Iâll see like, âOh.â I see theyâre about to drift off.â And I thought it was just so cool that I can look at a screen and I can tell whether or not this person is paying attention based on their brainwaves. And that became initially an idea that I had around, âOh, we could test advertising with this.â Because at that time, a lot of ad testing was not done digitally. It was done in these in-person focus groups. So youâre about to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign distribution of that. And the way you test that is bringing a collection of 20, 30 people into a room and asking them what they thought about the ad.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatâs crazy that thatâs what we did.
Jake Stauch:
And it was nuts! That was kind of state-of-the-art at the time. And the state of the art was also like you could get a dial that you could, while you were watching the ad, turn it up or down on whether or not you liked it or not. And so the initial idea was, âHey, letâs go and test advertising with brain scans and see when people are paying attention to the ad and what other kind of brain responses we can look at. And that might be a more interesting, more objective way of evaluating how these advertisements are doing.â Started that business, did quite well actually. Worked with a lot of amazing brands that were very excited about this. Very clear, though, I could see the writing on the wall that this space was moving more and more towards digital ad testing where, âYes, we could bring these people together in a focus group and spend tens of thousands of dollars to test this single ad, or we could just launch it in a digital format and get very quick feedback on what was working and what was not.â
And so that was becoming obvious and I had this conversation with one of our customers that said, âYou know what I would actually like to do? Iâd actually like to take this home, put it on my kid who has ADHD, and see when theyâre paying attention to their homework and when their attention drops off. And I think that would be really interesting to me.â We took that idea and were like, âI think this actually is really interesting. And what if we could give them kids feedback on when theyâre paying attention and when theyâre not, maybe even give them a game to play, or the more they focused, the faster their dragon flew or the further ahead in a tunnel they could see. And so you tied it to game mechanics.â So we ended up pimping the company, building this company called NeuroPlus that made brain-controlled video games for kids with ADHD and other attention problems. So brain-controlled video games to train attention skills. And it was really cool and it worked really well. We did randomized clinical trials. Found it was more effective than medications in helping kids improve attention skills.
Turner Novak:
Why is that?
Jake Stauch:
Attention is a skill. You can practice paying attention just like you can practice anything else. The problem with practicing that is you donât have feedback. You donât know when youâre doing a good job. And so by giving you real-time feedback on how well youâre paying attention, you can train yourself to get better and better. Now, it basically is diet and exercise for the brain. So yes, it is very effective, but it also requires a commitment and a lot of hard work and a lot of effort, and itâs very hard to compete with medication in this space. We learned this the hard way. Seven years I spent building this business, had great early traction, a lot of superfan customers, a lot of amazing families that we helped, but was never a rocket ship company and never had that kind of rocket ship trajectory and just kind of slowly, slowly grew very, very slowly over time and always felt like we were one step away from really unlocking something. But it never really happened.
And I think fundamentally because the product market fit was not there. We thought our market was everyone who takes Adderall, everyone who has ADHD, which is increasingly 10-20% of the population depending on age group. And it turns out our market is actually the families that had their kids on these medications that had a really severe negative reaction. These medications do have a long tail of side effects that include loss of appetite and trouble sleeping and in severe cases seizures and other issues. And so those families loved our product, but that ended up being a very, very tiny percentage of the market. And most families, these drugs are safer and effective. Theyâre often free or very inexpensive. They take zero time. And so itâs hard to compete against that when what we were offering took a lot more time, money, energy, effort.
Turner Novak:
Was it like a cap that they wore?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, we actually built the hardware. So we built a consumer EEG device that measured their brain waves. And then we also built the software, which was a set of video games that they could play that responded to brain mechanics.
Turner Novak:
With their brain? They were playing with their brain or was there a controller?
Jake Stauch:
No, with their brain. So the more they focused, the more they were paying attention, the faster their dragon would fly, for example. Or we had one where it would put wind in their sails as they sailed the pirate ship.
Turner Novak:
So they just had to pay attention to the game and to when to blow the sails?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. Basically, they had to activate the parts of their brain that are associated with attention, so weâre basically linking. Thereâs these correlations. So when your brain is active in a certain way, the brain activity looks a little bit different than if youâre zoning out or if youâre falling asleep, those kinds of things. And so we use that, but then we also use other mechanics. So weâd also look at your muscle tension to see if you were tense, and so weâd make sure that you were relaxing as well. And then also, we tracked your body movement to make sure youâre sitting still. So you basically had to relax, sit still, focus and play this game.
And I think the coolest part of the experience was I got to go to hundreds of familiesâ homes and watch kids play this and help them get set up, and the feedback system and the game mechanics made it so that kids could be like, âOh, wow, I can do this if I try.â And a lot of the benefit, I think, is just convincing people that they can pay attention, they can do these things if they put in the effort, and a lot of times they didnât think that they could.
Turner Novak:
So you mentioned you were doing this for seven years. You also told me earlier that thereâs no point in the company where you had more than three months of runway. And this was a hardware company?
Jake Stauch:
A hardware company, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So how did that go, just financing the business and making it work for seven years?
Jake Stauch:
It was a very hard company to fundraise for. I mean, one, I had no experience.
Turner Novak:
Because you started in school?
Jake Stauch:
I had started it in college. I dropped out of college to run the company, so I did not have a track record of success. Number two-
Turner Novak:
And you worked in North Carolina then?
Jake Stauch:
I was in North Carolina. I was not in a fundraising environment that was really frothy or ripe. A great place to start a company, for sure. I loved it there. I loved Durham, loved the Triangle, but not the most lucrative fundraising environment compared to, say, the Bay Area. I was also in consumer, I was also in hardware, I was also in healthcare, and we were not doing the FDA path. So it was kind of like in this no manâs land of, âThis is just not a category that anyone was really excited about.â Thereâs not really a fund whose thesis is, âNon-FDA consumer healthcare products that require hardware and also game development.â It was like pick all the things that scare off investors and that was basically what we were doing. And then of course we didnât have crazy traction early on. It was just absolute grind.
And so investors, rightfully so, were skeptical of the business and very hard to fundraise. I did put together several rounds of funding, but the way those funding rounds often came together was they were tranched rounds where weâd raise a little bit at a time and itâd be unlocked with milestones, or it was kind of rolling closes where we couldnât put all the money together, so weâd raise 50K and then a 100K and then 50K. And so what that meant in practice is, for that seven-year period, I really had never had more than three months of runway in the bank to pay our employees, which made it an incredibly stressful experience, but also incredible learning experience. Itâs basically an inoculation against future stress and panic when you just live in that world for so long. It definitely makes you more resilient to that kind of environment in the future. And luckily, Iâve not had to have that same experience at Serval.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, it probably just trains you. Whatâs the one Bane quote from Batman? âI grew up in the pain,â basically. âNothing fazes me.â
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, exactly-
Turner Novak:
âIâve seen way worse than this.â
Jake Stauch:
âIâve seen way worse.â And thereâs nothing that can really faze me and no kind of downturn that can scare me because Iâve seen worse.
Turner Novak:
And then you ended up getting a job at a company called Verkada.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Did you move to San Francisco and were like, âI got to figure out my life.â type of moment? How did-
Jake Stauch:
I was trying to figure out my life. It was very clear that I was not on a rocket ship startup and I had really come to terms that we did not find product market fit, and the path we were on was not getting us to product market fit, and I was wrong about the market. And that took a lot longer than I liked to admit to realize, but eventually I did have that realization. So then itâs like, âOkay, what do I want to do next?â I was very lucky to have a friend from college that had joined Verkada, very early, running marketing, and he actually initially called my wife to see if she would join Verkada.
Turner Novak:
Did she do more marketing type stuff historically?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. So she was the CEO of her own startup and had rolled off that startup, that startup got acquired, and then was at McKinsey doing some marketing stuff. And he said, âI need you here at Verkada. Itâs crazy whatâs happening here. Youâve got to come.â And she said, âNo, but you should talk to my husband.â So she passed the phone over to me and I was like, âSure, Iâll chat with the team.â I was not really interested in security cameras. I had this perspective of, âI make brain-controlled video games. I do the coolest stuff in the world.â
Turner Novak:
Iâm above some bullshit security-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, âIâm not going to build commercial security cameras. That is not interesting at all.â At the time, itâs silly, but I was like, âAs a favor to you, you know what? Iâll meet the rest of the team. Iâll hear what they have to say.â And then I end up chatting with the CEO, Filip, and just very impressed by Filip and the company they were building. I fly out to San Francisco to meet more of the team. In this process of the first call, there were maybe 15 employees. By the time I fly out to meet them, like 90 employees. And so-
Turner Novak:
What? Wait, 15 to 90?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I saw this growth just in real time and I was like, âWow.â Iâd been grinding away for years and years and years and these people, in my mind, basically just started the company. I think it was two years old or a year and a half at this point, but they basically just started. And theyâre just crushing. Itâs like, âI have to see what this looks like. I have not felt this kind of product market fit before.â I got more excited about the category. Cameras are actually pretty interesting, especially when you think about AI and computer vision, think about the impact youâre having on safety, and security technology was more interesting than I thought. And I felt like I had a lot of value to add because I had been building in the intersection of hardware and software for a long time. And so I came in as an early product leader initially on the camera side, but then eventually got to run a bunch of new business units for Verkada. It was such an incredible learning experience.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, itâs a cool product. I had Filip on the show maybe like a year ago. Iâll throw a link in the description so people can check it out. But he showed me a demo where basically you have this app and you can type in, if youâre a security professional, you can type in âred shirtâ and just any footage of someone with a red shirt, it just pops it up. You can jump in, watch it. You can type âTesla,â whatever you want, and it will just identify it in the footage. And thereâs a lot more stuff that obviously the Verkada product does. And I think he has gotten into the access systems on buildings, not just the cameras, all the different security tech and building technology now. Itâs pretty interesting how itâs evolved.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. And becoming more and more proactive so you can detect things that might be problematic or might be threats before they mature and evolve, and prevent crime, prevent people getting hurt. I think thatâs really the promise here and itâs so exciting.
Turner Novak:
And so what all did you learn at Verkada? I think you were there for four or five years.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, close to five years. Man, itâs hard to imagine. One, I saw what product market fit looks like. I saw the impact you can have when you have a product that people are just buying and that thereâs actually that fit between what youâre selling and what the market wants. I learned a lot about B2B and enterprise sales. And Verkada is a legendary sales team and got to be a part of a lot of those conversations and the growth of that company. I learned how to grow and build a team at a larger scale. We got to start a lot of zero-to-one products at Verkada, and the way Verkada thinks about these things is theyâre very isolated products. We treat new products like new business units and youâre responsible for the revenue of that business unit and youâre responsible for building out that team and product and what the vision looks like.
And it was cool because I got paired with this director... I was director of product. I got paired with a director of engineering counterpart, and we got to build these new businesses from zero to one within Verkada. And, one, built a great relationship. Two, just got to learn a lot about what was working and what wasnât. Launched a lot of things that worked incredibly well and sold incredibly well, launched a lot of things that didnât, and saw the difference between those approaches, those products. And you just got so many repetitions in. You just got these reps in.
And, one, I ended up starting a company, starting Serval, with that director of engineering counterpart. So we got to basically do a five-year trial run of what it was like to work together and kind of start something together. And two, I just got to see so much product that we built and shipped and saw what happened there. And then, three, our customer was IT. This entire time we are selling into IT teams.
Turner Novak:
Itâs like security IT, right? Or-
Jake Stauch:
Itâs actually more often just generic IT. So what happened in this space and what really helped Verkada as a tailwind is security cameras, access control systems, a lot of the building kind of security infrastructure, as these became network devices that people wanted to access remotely and connect to their network, the ownership of these purchases and usage migrated from more of a facilities team to more of the IT team. Now, once you plug into the network, IT at least has a say and eventually becomes the owner. And so-
Turner Novak:
Because before there would just be like a VCR, TV tape thing that the security-
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. VCR initially, and then it became an NVR, like a DVR, kind of like a TiVo for security cameras that was on site, but itâs still an on-prem server that stores all the data, all the footage, and itâs all managed on this device. But eventually you say, âOh, itâd be cool to watch this footage from my home and connect it to the internet.â And when facilities starts plugging in devices into the network, into the switch, IT says, âWait a minute, let me get involved here.â Oversimplification, but over time, IT takes on more and more of an ownership of this function. And so what it means for us is I was almost exclusively spending my time with IT, basically doing five years of customer discovery with IT, figuring out, âWhat do we want to build for you next? What are your pain points, what are your problems?â And of course I hear nonstop about the help desk and all the manual tasks that theyâre stuck with, kind of the worst parts of their job.
And unfortunately at Verkada, my job is kind of like, âSteer them away from that and talk about, âYeah, what about the things that are drilled into the wall? Talk to me about HVAC and speakers and all these other potential product extensions that are more related to our overall product portfolio.ââ But the lessons there really stuck with me of, âI understand what their pain points are. I understand what their job looks like.â And I think the biggest thing that stood out was the automation surface area was practically zero. They werenât automating anything.
And that was such a disconnect for me because my perception being in Silicon Valley, seeing all these amazing tools that all these companies were building, it seemed like thereâs all these amazing IT enterprise automation tools, and then thatâs juxtaposed with going on site with these customers and seeing IT up close and personal, and nothingâs automated. Theyâre not automating anything. And so what is the gap there? Whatâs causing that disconnect? That really kind of haunted me and my co-founder and eventually became the inspiration for what became Serval is, âWell, what happens if we solve that automation gap? What happens if we make it very, very easy to build the automation and we take the friction away?â Youâll actually end up with much bigger automation surface area.
Turner Novak:
And I know thereâs a question that you asked to get really close to that problem and answer. Do you want me to say the question or do you know what the question is?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I know what the question is. It was the most important customer discovery question that we had when we were exploring ideas was, âIf you could hire someone to just sit next to you and do work all day long, what would you have them do?â And when I started asking that question, it became very clear what people wanted, which is they want somebody to sit next to them, one, build a bunch of automations, try out different automation tools. These tools, theyâre very excited about them, but if youâre handling tickets all day, when are you going to carve out time to build these things? And so they want somebody to go and build automations for them and then take on all of these repetitive manual tasks, the help desk tasks, all the low value, high effort tasks that IT is often stuck with.
And so it was very interesting to hear those two things, âI want somebody to go build automations for me. I want somebody to take over the help desk.â And we believe that those two problems are actually linked. That if you actually had somebody building automations for you that were really good, youâd also make the help desk problem go away, too. And so once we understood that, âThis is fundamentally what people want,â then it becomes a question of like, âWell, how do you deliver it?â And thatâs what led to Serval.
Turner Novak:
And the existing help desk platforms, were they not picking up on this feedback? Because it seems like they werenât solving for it necessarily?
Jake Stauch:
They werenât. I think in a pre-AI world, it was not an easy problem to solve at all and probably an impossible challenge to solve because they all offered workflow builders that could solve all of these problems. The challenge was not that the tools didnât exist, that you couldnât build workflows to automate all of these things. That has been around for a long time. And I think if youâre a product leader of these companies, you might say, âWell, I donât know why they didnât build these automations. We gave them all the tools. They could have automated everything.â But that was the problem is that the capability of the tools outpaced the time and energy that IT had at their disposal to go and implement those tools. And so what you needed to solve was not yet another automation tool, yet another workflow builder but, âHow do we short circuit the process of building those workflows? How do we not give you automation to automate the automation so that whole process of building out those workflows happens automatically?â
Turner Novak:
And this wouldnât have really been possible pre all the code gen tools?
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. Because our approach was, âHey, the only way to make this work and make this work reliably is to take your natural language description of what you want to automate and turn that into automation. We think the best way to do that is actually by writing the underlying code to power that automation.â In a world where that doesnât exist, very, very hard to make that work reliably.
Turner Novak:
This is maybe interesting for people who are thinking about startup ideas not Serval related, where else do you think this could be applicable, creating products for customers by creating code, in even an adjacent category? Have you thought about that much?
Jake Stauch:
I havenât actually. Iâve been so heads down on Serval. Iâve not thought about the other things we can do. I mean, I think obviously-
Turner Novak:
Maybe adjacent categories for Serval then. Whereâs-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, we think about a lot. We start often with the IT and security teams, but then within a couple of weeks of using our product, usually theyâre branching this off into HR, people teams, finance teams, legal, operation staff, because the automations weâre building are not limited to IT. Of course they actually expand beyond the company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because itâs like identity products, itâs like security sort of, in some cases. I can definitely see the adjacencies in, I donât know, HR, customer facing, touching things.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, our mission here is build the AI platform for employee support, get people back to meaningful work. And so that means, yes, a lot of employee support is IT related. Most of it is IT related still. But people still have a lot of questions for the people team and a lot of questions for the other departments. And I think that part of the category is growing very quickly as these employee support requests continue to mount. And people are always going to need support at work. And we want to build a platform that makes it very easy to build the automations for those other teams, especially the non-technical teams that donât have the resource to go and build these workflows themselves.
Turner Novak:
So you had this insight from Verkada, you started building it, was it just off to the races, everything clicked and worked, customers signing up left and right? How did it go?
Jake Stauch:
Oh, how I wish that was the case. So we started building, and I think from the very early days, thereâs a couple of things we knew were true. One is that the technology was not there yet. So when we tried to build a proof of concept of this natural language to code workflow builder, it fundamentally did not work.
Turner Novak:
So what time was this?
Jake Stauch:
This is April, May 2024. So like GPT-4, going into GPT-4.5, I think, is coming out maybe around that time or maybe a little bit later. But thatâs kind of like this era. Itâs pre-GPT-4o.
Turner Novak:
But this was the summer of Cursor, where code gen was first, I guess, working truly?
Jake Stauch:
It was starting to, especially the autocomplete and, âI see what youâre doing here and I can get you the next stuff,â but the true autonomous of like, âHey, I want to go do this thing,â the reliability of just generating that on the fly was just not quite there. And so if you were really on the rails and you said something simple like, âReset Google Workspace password, and hereâs the Google Docs,â it would do a pretty good job and that would work fairly reliably. So you had a set of cases where it would work reliably. And thatâs what gave us confidence. Like, âOkay, well, it works for this set of cases. Where it doesnât work is as soon as you start to get creative and you kind of go off the rails. Thatâs where it starts to break down.â And so we were confident that we were just one or two model iterations away from this really starting to click, and so that gave us confidence.
We felt like, âHey, this works better honestly than we thought it would, not as good as it needs to in the future, but weâre not that far off.â So we had confidence there. And especially once 4o came out, it felt like there were a lot of tools then obviously that the cloud models started to be much better on the code gen side. But once that started to happen, we got a lot more confidence there. So, one, is we knew that that would be hard. We decided to do that problem first. Our vision from the beginning was, âNo, weâre not going to just build an AI layer. Weâre going to build a full ITSM platform, go after the legacy incumbents, build the full system of record.â We felt that was very important from product strategy, from a business strategy.
Turner Novak:
Why did you feel that? Because some of the consensus wisdom is, âBuild a small little wedge-in product that works, then you expand from there.â You were-
Jake Stauch:
Fundamentally, I disagree with that in this area, at least for our business and our customer. We just felt like a lot of the low-hanging fruit problems are solved by a handful of point solutions. What you really need to do is build a better platform. And I think part of that just comes from looking at the market, looking at what people spend money on. People spend a lot of money on IT service management, and we want to go straight after those budgets. We donât want to convince somebody to create a new category, a new budget for us. We want to go after their existing spend directly. That was part one on the business strategy. On the product strategy, we just felt like, âYou just cannot build the perfect product experience if youâre tied to somebody elseâs platform. If step one to getting value out of Serval is setting up ServiceNow, setting up Jira Service Management in way that we need it set up, thatâs just not the ideal product experience. We want to be able to own that end-to-end experience from day one.â
And so we knew the product vision was very, very big, very expansive. We decided to start with the hardest problem. We knew we could build a great ticketing system, asset management, all these other things. But the hardest problem was going to be, âCan you get this workflow builder, this AI code gen system to work reliably?â And so we spent a lot of time on that. We convinced ourselves pretty early on that, âHey, itâs pretty close and itâs going to be there and itâs doing really cool things.â And then we started building out the rest of the platform. But because weâre going after this category of legacy incumbents, IT service management, thereâs a couple of things that made it really hard in the early days. One is startups do not buy IT service management. Startups donât have IT Teams.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, itâs just the founders like, âOh, you started? Here you go.â
Jake Stauch:
âHereâs your laptop. Let me know if you need help provisioning stuff. Go for it.â And so you canât sell to a 10-person company or a 30-person company or really even 100-person company.
Turner Novak:
You need to sell to corporations, large enterprises.
Jake Stauch:
Yes. The smallest company that would even have an IT function is going to be at least 100 employees, probably like 200, 300 employees.
Turner Novak:
Whatâs the smallest customer youâve got?
Jake Stauch:
Around 200 employees. Thatâs really the early stage. And usually only those customers when thereâs the high growth trajectory where they know theyâre about to get much bigger. And so what that means is that the customers youâre talking to either donât have this problem because theyâre too small or are mature enough where they need the product to be really good and really mature.
Turner Novak:
Theyâre not going to test out... Thatâs the thing. Sometimes if you got other friend with an early stage company, âLetâs try each otherâs products,â give them feedback, but youâre probably-
Jake Stauch:
Thereâs none of that. Yeah, no IT or security leader is like, âOh, yeah, Iâll throw this in front of my users. Whatâs the worst that could happen?â
Turner Novak:
Yeah, people just reset. They lock the founders out of the company.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. In order for it to have a lot of value, it also needs to have a lot of access and you need to connect it to critical business systems. And so it was very challenging, one, just because of the product surface area. It just didnât do all the things. Theyâre not going to replace their existing incumbent software with you when itâs missing 80% of what the incumbent software does.
Turner Novak:
So did you spend a long period of time just building all these different features that would convert?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, our vision was that this didnât really work until you actually had the workflow builder combined with the full ticketing platform, combined with access management, automating access requests, which is a big part of the help desk, and all these other capabilities, and have this full unified experience. And so from the beginning we had this vision of, âThis has to be this big product or else thereâs just no reason for somebody to migrate off their existing tools.â But that was really challenging because it takes a while to build that. And for the first six months or so, itâs just me and my co-founder. Heâs spending all of his time building, weâre talking to customers nonstop, but thereâs just no pull because what weâre showing them doesnât come close to what it needs to do.
Turner Novak:
So how long did it take to sign the first dollar of revenue?
Jake Stauch:
Over a year. Over a year of just building and building and building and getting nice compliments of, âThis looks really cool. Keep us posted,â but nothing that feels like a buying signal or getting close to a purchase. We had design partnerships, building alongside customers, but even the design partnerships, it always felt like we were just so far away from this being an actual tool that they would purchase and replace their, because again, itâs always a rip and replace. Thereâs not really a greenfield opportunity here. If youâre a decent-sized company, you have a solution in place and weâre trying to displace it. So it was challenging.
Turner Novak:
Were there any signals of like, âHey, weâre in month 11, no oneâs paid us for this yet, but we think next month we might get it.â How did you know that you could keep going?
Jake Stauch:
This is the hardest problem in startups, I feel like, is knowing what is a persistence problem. Youâre actually just a lot of hard work and a couple months away from unlocking something and where youâre just deluding yourself, which honestly in my first company, thereâs a lot of self-delusion of thinking that we were just one feature away, one product launch away, and if we just built the next thing that weâd unlock some big part of the market. And something I heard that I think is very true is good founders can often squeeze some degree of product market fit out of ideas that donât really have legs. And so you can very easily have this motivated reasoning thatâs like, âOh, no, this is going to work. We just need to keep building and we just need to keep doing stuff.â And that could be completely wrong. In this case, we were right that we just needed to keep building, but it was really hard to know that in the moment.
Turner Novak:
So could you dissect a difference between your first and second company, maybe? Maybe itâs pretty obvious now in retrospect.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I think in the first company I was very optimistic. And so every signal I got that was positive, I think, just fueled me and I just kind of was seeking the positive, just gravitating towards the positive feedback, like, âWow, this customer is so excited.â This mom who used it with her kid said it changed their life. âWe need to just keep going, keep going, keep going.â And I think in the second company, very jaded, very skeptical. The positive feedback basically had no impact on me. I didnât feel it at all. I was like, âWhatever, I donât believe you.â And then the negative feedback, really gravitate towards that of like, âOkay, this person doesnât think that this is a good idea. Letâs dissect that, understand that.â And so just having an overall more skeptical view of the market and taking so much more positive feedback for me to feel like weâre heading in the right direction.
Turner Novak:
Youâre on month 10 of no customers that are actually paying you and 10 months of just negative feedback, wouldnât you say, âYou know what? Letâs go to this other thing. Letâs go to a completely different areaâ?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. And I think itâs important that itâs not negative feedback, itâs just no buying feedback. Itâs like, âThis is really cool guys. Keep me posted. This is awesome. I love it. Keep me up to date. Add me to your newsletter.â We just got these things of, âThis is very far away.â And it got really tough because you just donât know if this is ever going to work out. And I remember going on a really long walk with my co-founder of, âShould we change course? Should we maybe pivot to something where we could sell it faster? Maybe it is just this very thin AI layer that we sell to early stage companies that just answers usersâ questions in Slack. And thatâs something that we could build and there would probably be early stage companies that buy it.â We thought about that. We were like, âWell, thereâs not really a market for that.â Thatâs not an exciting space to go after.
You canât name me a hundred-billion-dollar company that sells a Slack bot. And it feels like you get stuck in that category for a while and then youâd be competing against a lot of other companies that we wouldnât really have a great advantage over. That didnât feel like a good idea. Do you go large enterprise, you say like, âHey, Iâm going to shrink the product surface area and maybe Iâm going to find a narrow approach that goes for the large enterprise.â I just felt like, âWell, then youâre not really going after the real category again. Youâre kind of taking a shortcut.â It just felt like, âHey, actually, I think weâre right. I think you have to build the full product. You just have to keep building.â
And so we just kind of talked about it and we looked at all the different alternatives and tried to be really honest and real with ourselves around what the different options were. And then doubled down and said, âNo, we are on the right path. When we get all the stuff we want into the product, people will start buying it and we will have a business.â And sure enough, a few weeks later, we got our first customer and then second customer and third customer. And then it just started to snowball and got to a really exciting place very quickly.
Turner Novak:
And so the snowballing happened. At what time did it start to snowball? Because I think you mentioned April of â25, you were still in this-
Jake Stauch:
April of â25, I did not know if it was going to work, and it very easily couldnât, and weâre still considering, âShould we do something different? Should we make some kind of radical change to the business?â
Turner Novak:
This is nine months ago.
Jake Stauch:
Nine months ago.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Jake Stauch:
May, we got our first customer. So that was a good signal, but it was very, very cheap. Crazy discounts. Still not a great deal.
Turner Novak:
What was the customer or the deal or the size? Are you allowed to say?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, it was actually Perplexity.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice. Okay.
Jake Stauch:
And they were the first one that actually signed.
Turner Novak:
Theyâre on that cusp of pretty large. Theyâre a âstartup,â but they have a lot of employees.
Jake Stauch:
Hundreds of employees and growing. At that point, hundreds of employees and inflecting very, very quickly, about to triple, and so had a need for a product like ours. But they had an existing solution in place and we had to rip it out. So that made it so that thereâs a lot the product had to do.
Turner Novak:
How do you rip that out? Did you have to help them with implementation and all that kind of stuff?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. One, we went on site every single week to meet with them in person.
Turner Novak:
Which sounds like a big deal, but actually some of the companies Iâve invested in that have had early success with big, tough, lumpy, hard-to-build products like this, the going on site for implementation is extremely important. Itâs like the forward deployed engineer thing thatâs become a meme at this point.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. We walk through the office. We literally sit around the IT leaderâs laptop and we just iterate, and we get all the things that weâre missing and we deliver that to the team, and we just keep building and building and building. And then eventually we get there. And then it started, and then we got our second and third customer in June-
Turner Novak:
Were these bigger contracts?
Jake Stauch:
They started to get bigger. The next contract was three times bigger than the last one, and the next one was twice as big as the one before that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, pretty quickly youâre like, âOh, man, someone oneâs finally buying us. Oh, wow, that oneâs way bigger. Holy shit.â
Jake Stauch:
Yes. And then we had one that came through that didnât even pilot us, that actually bought us at list price without even a pilot. And that was, I think, one of the first early signals of, âOh, no, this is going to work. This is going to work.â
Turner Novak:
Thatâs awesome. How did that feel? For somebody whoâs maybe in the 11 months through this or the April of 2025, internally, how does that feel as a founder when you finally get that?
Jake Stauch:
Itâs this massive relief, but then itâs also immediately coupled with the anxiety of like, âOh, no, we have so much to do.â
Turner Novak:
âNow, we actually have to deliver.â
Jake Stauch:
âNow, we actually have to deliver. They just bought this thing. We have a lot to build to make sure they have a fantastic experience. We are certainly not out of the woods just because we have three customers. We cannot get too excited about that. We got a long, long way to go.â
Turner Novak:
But thereâs probably that extra motivation. Youâre like, âI can keep doing this now because itâs finally working.â
Jake Stauch:
Yes. And then we ended up, because we got really great logos, we got five or six great customers and so many customers in pipeline. At that point, we had five or six customers, 20 or so in pilot. And thatâs when we started getting preempted on our Series A because people were starting to take notice, a lot of enthusiasm around the category, around the space.
Turner Novak:
So do you know how that happened? Were downstream investors that were preempting you talking to your existing investors? Or was it like customers were telling the investors?
Jake Stauch:
They were talking to customers. So they were doing research on the space. This is not a clever idea to go after ServiceNow, to go after this ITSM. A lot of people can come up with this idea of, âOh, hey, thereâs this massive software company. Maybe we can build a better version.â And so I think this is part of a lot of investorsâ thesis that thereâs going to be a better version of IT service management, of enterprise service management built. And so there are always investors interested in what we are doing, and theyâre kind of always on the background and seeing how things are going.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, like, âIf it works, maybe weâll talk.â
Jake Stauch:
And once they started talking to our customers and hearing feedback, some of which was feedback theyâd never heard before from customers. The level of enthusiasm for an IT service management product was just off the charts.
Turner Novak:
Itâs like a boring product, you would think of, âWhy are you excited about this?â
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. And these people are obsessed with it and said basically the worst thing that could happen in their life is this being taken away from them. And so with that enthusiasm, because the TAM is so large here, that was enough signal for a lot of investors because the TAM is insanely massive. You donât have to prove that thereâs a market here. You have to prove that you built something so special that you can actually make a dent in that market. And thatâs what we did. Ended up raising our Series A from the wonderful folks at Redpoint. Theyâve spent a lot of time in the ITSM space. They got really excited about what we were doing.
And had a lot of options for our Series A, but Redpoint was clearly the ones that had understood the space the best and felt like they had the most value to add. And then it just felt like off to the races. At the time we got our Series A term sheet, I think we were eight people as a company. And then very quickly started to grow, started to hire the customers, started to snowball. We hired our first sales rep. Obviously, in the day-to-day, everything feels chaotic and stressful and you lose deals, you win deals, and it feels up and down. But then if you zoom out, it looks like it was just a crazy rocket ship trajectory. You just-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, Iâm sure somebody looks at Serval right now like, âOh, always been crushing it. I am sure things are great. Thereâs no problems. Itâs all easy.â You just look at the chart that you probably have. But as weâve said for the past hour, it wasnât the easiest journey.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, for sure. Itâs like you zoom out, it looks like this crazy up into the right trajectory, you zoom in and you see the spikes and the ups and downs and all the things that feel like on a day-to-day basis that theyâre not going well. But yeah, if you zoom out, itâs been just an incredible story.
Turner Novak:
And then you said the day you announced a Series A, you got a term sheet for the Series B. Was that, again, just people were like, âWe want to give you moneyâ? How did that go?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, we delayed the announcement of Series A a little bit, so we ended up doing the Series A in August, but then-
Turner Novak:
Do you feel like everyone kind of knew, all the investors you-
Jake Stauch:
Oh, for sure.
Turner Novak:
Everyone was like, âWe got-â
Jake Stauch:
You canât keep secrets. Everyone knows everything, it seems like. And so we raised the Series A, closed that in August, announced in October. The day we announced the Series A in October though, I get a text from Sequoia saying, âHey, can you come to our office?â I say, âNo, Iâm in Orlando. Iâm at an IT conference actually in Orlando.â Then they text back and say, âWhere are you staying?â And ended up flying out to Orlando from San Francisco, one partner from San Francisco, one partner from London, and, âMeet me for dinner with the term sheet.â And thatâs how the Series B happened. And the idea was they talked to all of our customers. Again, at this point, many, many more customers than five.
They talked to all of our customers, they talked to everyone that Iâve ever worked with, basically, managers, peers, direct reports. They also talked to all of our competitorsâ customers and they had this full picture of the market and they just knew that weâre going to win. And so why wait on the sidelines for us to grow as a company? Why not just come in as early as possible?
Turner Novak:
Did you consider anyone else, or were you just like, âThis is a really good offerâ?
Jake Stauch:
I initially said no at dinner, mostly just because we just fundraised and it felt like, âHey, we just raised $50 million Series A.â
Turner Novak:
Oh, it was 50, you said?
Jake Stauch:
It was the 50 million Series A. At the time, I think maybe weâre like 15 people as a company. I donât have a way to deploy additional capital. It doesnât make sense for us to bring a Series B at this time.
Turner Novak:
So then what did they do to convince you?
Jake Stauch:
One is I talked to a lot of references of people that have raised money from Sequoia. I thought about the impact it could have, not just the additional capital, but the support of a great new set of investors, great set of partners. And so as I considered like, âHey, what are the different options? What are the different things? Yes, we could postpone our Series B to where it makes more sense in six months, but there could be a lot of value in doing this now from a support perspective and from a signaling perspective and helping with hiring and customer acquisition and all these things.â So I decided that it made a lot of sense.
Turner Novak:
This is about three months later. Was it a good call? Do you feel like youâve gotten all they brought to the table?
Jake Stauch:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Great decision. Donât regret it at all. Support on the customer side, on the candidate side, recruiting side, strategy side, just across the board. And we felt that honestly from all of our investors. Iâve been very nervous about taking every single check that we took.
Turner Novak:
Really? Okay.
Jake Stauch:
Itâs a big decision. You know that these people are going to be on your cap table forever. These are people who youâre going to have to answer a phone call for, for the rest of your life potentially. And so, are these people that you really want to basically get into a marriage with? And itâs stressful. Itâs stressful to make that kind of commitment. But every single investment we brought on board, I felt so lucky to have them involved and we made the right decision every single time, I think.
Turner Novak:
So when you think about good support from an investor helping with customer introductions or with hiring, what does a good relationship there look like? Are they texting you a LinkedIn profile, like, âMy cousinâs looking for an internship. Can you interview himâ? What does a good relationship look like for you?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I think it changes a little bit based on stage. First round was one of our leads, and our seed round alongside General Catalyst. First round was incredible at the seed stage. I mean, thereâs just no one better. They really are so focused on that stage.
Turner Novak:
They were probably really supportive through the journey of, âWe donât know if this is going to work-â
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. And this is what they do is they spend time with companies before they become successful companies, before anyone knows what these companies are. And theyâve seen it all and theyâve seen it all at that stage. And so it was so valuable to have, first round, Bill Trenchard over there as a partner. Constant meetings, constant one-on-ones, so much support, both strategic and emotional support of like, âHey, this is normal that this takes a while to figure out.â But just actually very tactical, like, âHereâs how founder-led sales can be structured.â They actually hosted a retreat training founders on founder-led sales and going through an entire four-day intensive course.
Turner Novak:
What was your biggest takeaway from that retreat?
Jake Stauch:
You learned a lot about running a successful pilot because weâve tried to start these pilots that ended up devolving into these endless, kind of this limbo, feature requests, and it never kind of ends, and it turns into a design partnership with no line of sight to signing a deal.
Turner Novak:
So is this just like, âOh, weâll do another three months kind of thingâ? How do you fall into that trap?
Jake Stauch:
You meet with them and theyâre like, âHey, what about this? What about that?â And then you just keep meeting with them. And itâs hard to have a purchasing conversation, especially early on, because the product legitimately is not mature enough. And so everything feels like a promise. And so itâs hard, especially selling against a legacy incumbent where itâs already entrenched. So youâre saying, âOkay, guys, well, Iâll do all these feature requests, but would love for you to rip out your existing system and then put this in, even though it doesnât do all the things you want it to do.â
Turner Novak:
Thatâs just hard to-
Jake Stauch:
Itâs a hard conversation to have. And so-
Turner Novak:
Did it change your approach?
Jake Stauch:
Oh, yeah. Basically setting up from the beginning, âHereâs the structure of the pilot, hereâs how weâre going to evaluate, here are the criteria for whether or not weâre going to move forward,â making that a structured conversation, and then structuring the meetings of the pilot to make sure weâre moving towards the evaluation and weâre not just kind of hanging out, meeting every week, and hearing more about what the product could do better. So thatâs a very tactical thing. First round made well over a hundred customer intros. So just, again, very tactically intro to the decision-maker at ICP customers, very valuable. Recruiting. I mean, they put their resources behind us to help us recruit. They were able to source us several candidates.
Turner Novak:
This was during that year of no customers converting-
Jake Stauch:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
... and they were introducing you to people and everyoneâs bouncing off. Were you able to keep the relationships and then those people you met in that first year, they now have started closing over the past couple months?
Jake Stauch:
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, itâs funny, we just restarted a pilot with a customer that we got introduced to before we even incorporated Serval. And it just dragged on for a while, ended up not going anywhere, and now theyâve come back and just kicked off a pilot with us. So weâre really excited about going back to those other customers. And whatâs interesting is, the early feedback from those customers was not negative, not like, âOh, this doesnât work.â Itâs like, âThis is awesome. We love where youâre going with it.â Basically, âCall me when you have a product,â because again, weâre not this net new thing that can just sit on top of your stack and you can plug in and just get value out of. You have to pull out, especially at this time, now weâve made this migration process much easier. You donât have to rip and replace your system of record, but at the time you had to pull out your full system of record and you had to migrate over to Serval. And thatâs a big ask, especially where we were as a company.
Turner Novak:
You changed how you did sort of the replacement, the rip and replace. You basically didnât have to do rip or they kind of automate it? So what exactly did you do?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, so one of the challenges in this category, and all AI companies face this, is, âAre you going to be the system of action layer on top of the system record or are you going to be the system of record?â Thereâs advantages to both approaches. We decided from early on we wanted to do both. We wanted to actually be the AI layer on top and the full system of record. And in the early days, we kind of really pushed forward to like, âHey, you should implement us as a full system of record.â Now what weâve found is, and we knew this would happen, then youâre sitting around kind of waiting for them to be ready to replace your system of record. So instead we said, âYou know what? Letâs do both really well, and we can be the AI layer on top of your existing system of record. We can sit on top of a ServiceNow or a Jira Service Management.â
But the way we do that is very unique in that itâs not just a simple layer. It actually becomes a mirror. So itâs not a layer, but a mirror where weâre mirroring the data in both systems. So all the tickets that flow through actually show up in both platforms. Why that ends up being important is the day, the moment you decide, âHey, could we just use Serval,â all the dataâs already there. There is no migration because youâve already been floating everything through the system. And it also incentivizes people to think about it in that way because they start working out of Serval and they notice, âHey, Serval has all my data here, it has all my configurations. It is a replica of my system of record. Why, again, are we using these two systems?â
And so we stopped having the conversation with customers of like, âHey, weâre going to replace your system of record.â We come in and say, âNo, itâs fine. Weâll just be a layer on top.â What we find is every single one of them, once they get implemented, start saying, âOh, we should just use Serval for everything.â And so thatâs been really, really important, and we knew we were going to do that from early on. Itâs not like we had this complete realization, but once that was actually implemented in the product in a really seamless way, that really helped us to not have a tough conversation early on, but instead say, âHey, you can implement this as your full system of record. You can implement this as a layer. It doesnât really matter to us. We know where youâre going to end up, which is youâre going to use the full platform.â
Turner Novak:
So did you build agents that automate the syncing of data?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. So we have a really robust thinking system with health checks, all the data sync between two systems, configurations on, âIs it a one-way sync, a two-way sync? When does the sync happen? What fields are synced? How do we interpolate things where we donât have a data match? Do we use AI to match fields?â Really, really robust. We decided to invest and make that a core part of the platform.
Turner Novak:
What is the timeline? Is it like if I type something in Serval, half a second later it shows up?
Jake Stauch:
Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So Iâm curious, what tool did you guys use to do that? Was it a certain software?
Jake Stauch:
No, we just built it internally.
Turner Novak:
Oh, you built it internally.
Jake Stauch:
We built it all internally, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Interesting. Itâs definitely a question that comes up a lot is this, âBuild the system of record layer on top.â How do you-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. We think the answer is both. And the way you do that is actually build it not as a layer, but as a mirror so that you can ease that transition. And a lot of this is just deciding to build really hard things because when you look at this problem, itâs like, âThis is impossible. All these fields, all the mappings, how do you solve this? This is so messy. API rate limits.â You run into so many challenges and a lot of this is just saying, âYou know what? Itâs really hard and thatâs why we should do it.â
Turner Novak:
And I know thereâs the stat that we both kind of thought was interesting. Itâs something like a Harvard study that said 90% of AI projects fail or something. I think itâs the-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, the MIT story.
Turner Novak:
Why do you think that is? Thatâs a massive number. You would think AI is a massive bubble and this whole thing should pop if no oneâs actually using it, right?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, I think if you take that at face value, and I think there are some concerns on how to think about that research, but I think if you assume that thatâs true, what we find is the technology has advanced to the point where the problem is not, âThe models are not good enough,â the problem is not, âThe software is not good enough.â The problem is translating the capabilities of the AI, of the software platform, to match the business processes. Or, reverse, you could change the business processes to match the capabilities and the way that the AI and the software is structured. And so that mismatch between how businesses are run and what the software can do, thatâs where you see things like forward deployed engineering and professional services trying to bridge that gap today.
That is the hardest problem to solve in these AI implementations today is the actual implementation of, âI run onboarding in this way. Iâve got a 72-page PDF on how onboarding works across the company. Serval has this amazing AI platform for automating workflows. How do we connect these? How do I get all the cool capabilities of the Serval platform and use that to automate all my onboarding?â Thatâs where a lot of the work happens, and thatâs where a lot of this can break down. And so I think whatâs going to be interesting over the next couple of years is youâre going to see a lot more focus, especially from companies like ours, on, âHow do we actually bridge that gap? How do we make it easier to translate the business requirements to the product capabilities without it being this huge implementation project that has to be owned entirely by a forward deployed engineering staff?â
Turner Novak:
I think you mightâve said this, maybe somebody else said this to me before, but it was like, âYou almost make the implementation part of the product.â So what have you found that works the best, or are you still navigating it?
Jake Stauch:
Weâre building some really cool stuff that are basically going to allow you to just tell the system, âHereâs what I want to do. Hereâs how we have things set up,â and it can both map to your business processes but also suggest changes to your business that make the overall structure, because a lot of this is meeting in the middle where you might have a certain flow that makes a lot of sense in a world before AI, but with AI tools, you could actually simplify this flow and itâll work a lot better. But a lot of large enterprises also say, âYou know what? The business process is not going to change. Weâre going to do it this way and I need your tool to adapt to that.â And if youâre selling to a large enterprise, you have to have a tool that can adapt to where the customer is and not force them to change how they do things, though a lot of times those changes can be very helpful in making the system overall more reliable.
Turner Novak:
But itâs kind of one of those, âThe bigger the ship is the harder it is to steer it.â If itâs just like 50,000-person company, itâs like you got to-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, theyâre not going to change how they do things because a vendor came in and said, âHey, it would be better if you did it this way.â No, you have to come in and say, âHey, we can do it exactly the way you want, and then we can talk later about how you can make some improvements.â
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So youâve raised, I forget actually the dollar amount. I probably should have rechecked this morning. But youâve raised, it sounds like, over $100 million.
Jake Stauch:
Over 125 million.
Turner Novak:
125 million. The majority you havenât spent yet-
Jake Stauch:
Correct.
Turner Novak:
... but youâre going to hire more people.
Jake Stauch:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
So how do you think about hiring right now with the phase that youâre at?
Jake Stauch:
I think whatâs really important is obviously we have incredible hiring goals and we went from eight people in August to 40 today, and weâve got crazy hiring goals for the rest of the year, and itâs not going to slow down. But in the middle of all that, you have to keep the bar incredibly high. You actually have to increase talent density as you hire.
Turner Novak:
That sounds hard. Founders are probably amazing. How do you hire people better than you?
Jake Stauch:
Itâs really hard. One is you have to have a vision thatâs really exciting. I mean, thatâs why weâre going after this massive category. Thatâs why weâre not just happy to be an AI layer, a startup that sells some kind of narrow niche, but weâre actually going after one of the biggest software categories in the world, and weâre going to be much bigger because weâre going after the services layer. So it starts with ambition and it starts with building a team that people want to join. It also starts with actually having the talent density to begin with. So the early hires end up being so important because then the next person you want to bring in thatâs really, really talented, they need to see your team and feel like, âOh, yeah, this is the group I want to be a part of.â Great people want to work with people that are better than them. Great people donât want to show up and realize, âOh, man, Iâm going to be maybe the best person here.â And thatâs what we want to build as a culture, though, is where every person that joins actually is raising the bar.
And one of the ways we do that is we actually make sure when weâre evaluating candidates that we think about it in that way of, âIs this person actually better than the median person at the company today, whatever the function is? Do they actually raise the bar in some meaningful way?â Because what often happens in these companies as they scale is you start hiring people that meet the bar. The people that are better are maybe then 40% of the people youâve hired in that role. And that makes sense in the moment because they hire, they do well in the interviews, and they actually do better or are better than 40%, almost half of the people in the entire company. And so how could you not hire this person? Theyâre better than the people doing the interview. But if you keep hiring at the 40th percentile over and over and over again, well, what happens-
Turner Novak:
Itâs just a downward slope-
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, it basically just continues to collapse. And the talent density collapses. And you see this happen over and over and over, especially as companies get very large, is that they cannot keep raising the bar. And so they hire people that are good enough, that are better than a lot of the people in place, again, probably better than some of the interviewers, and yet theyâre not actually better than the median or the average. And so, one of the questions we ask as part of the debrief on a candidate is, âWho are they better than?â Because if you canât tell me who theyâre actually going to be better than, and-
Turner Novak:
Oh, this is an internal question. I thought it was-
Jake Stauch:
Internal.
Turner Novak:
... like you ask the candidate, âWho are you better than?â
Jake Stauch:
Oh, yeah, that would be great. Make them challenge somebody for their job. No, we donât do that. We just do it as a forcing function. Obviously, collapsing somebody onto a single dimension of good or bad, itâs impossible to do. But I think itâs important to think about it in this way of saying, âHey, are they actually raising the bar in some way?â And maybe itâs because theyâre super high slope, so maybe theyâre less experienced and theyâre not going to come in and be as productive as some of the folks on the team, but we believe that within a couple of years they could be one of the best engineers here, or they bring a new skill set that we just donât have on the team and they raise the bar in that way. So I think thereâs different ways to raise the bar, but I think they have to come in and make us better.
And I think the other thing they have to do is, âAre we excited for their start date?â This is the best gut check is if they sign today and theyâve got their start date two weeks, three weeks from now, are we counting down the days until this person starts or is this just kind of, âYeah, itâs great theyâll start this day.â All the best candidates, you are so excited for the day they start because youâre going to feel that impact. And so itâs really important to raise the bar on these candidates. Our foundational principle is that every candidate raises the bar.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatâs a fun, really easy to remember, just gut check on a candidate, âAre you excited for them to work for you?â I mean, so simple. But so many times youâre like, âNot really.â
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. A lot of times youâll go through the debrief and everyone will pass them. Theyâll say like, âYep, three. Three out of four, three out of four, three out of four, we should hire them,â but no oneâs excited. Then you say, âAre we excited for this person to join? Who are they better than at the company?â And youâll find very quickly like, âOh, actually, this is not a bar raiser. This is somebody thatâs good.â Hiring an elite team means saying no to a lot of great people. And thatâs the hardest part of the job is that these people come in and theyâre actually great, and thereâs nothing wrong with them, and they did very well, but they donât get a spot.
Turner Novak:
And one kind of interesting hire you made that was, maybe at this point, itâs not that contrarian, but you hired somebody, it was one of the earliest employees to work on video production.
Jake Stauch:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
So talk me through that.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, it was really interesting. So, one, is we knew we were hiring this incredible growth team. My COO is my wife and I hired her, and she was running growth at Rippling. And we knew we were going to have this incredible growth team at the company, but the growth team is only as good as the content you can equip them with. You canât put a bunch of stuff in front of people and expect it to convert if youâre not really investing in content and storytelling. We also knew that because weâre going after these large enterprises, we really needed to punch above our weight from a brand and content perspective because-
Turner Novak:
Because if you look like a startup-
Jake Stauch:
If we look like a startup, no oneâs going to buy us because people do not buy from startups in this category. The companies weâre competing against are massive, massive companies. We have to punch above our weight and we have to equip our growth team with great content. And so for us, itâs like, âActually, we want to bring this in house and we want to have this be a core competency.â And so whatâs funny is I reached out to the best video person I ever worked with. Absolute legend. And I just asked, âHey, do you have anyone in your network because youâre the best Iâve worked with? You have to know people that are looking to join an early stage startup.â
And he reached out and he said, âYou know what? I might know somebody.â And even though I had no intention and no idea that we could actually get our top choice or the person that weâre most excited about, I just wanted him to introduce me to somebody, and instead he came to the office and was so excited about what weâre doing and decided to join us, and one of the best hires we made.
Turner Novak:
Wow, thatâs awesome. And one other thing you said you focus on a lot is the people that you hire, are they also able to make more hires for you, help you recruit.
Jake Stauch:
Exactly. Yeah, so raising the bar is one thing, but then we also think about this from, obviously, team is the only durable advantage in this era. Any product advantage, insights you have about the market, itâs not going to last very long.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I could vibe code a decent version of service-
Jake Stauch:
Thereâs so many amazing smart entrepreneurs out there. The funding environment is so rich. Funding is not a differentiator. Talent is the only true long-term differentiator because it compounds and the people that use these tools, they just compound and compound and compound. And so we knew that talent was going to be really important. And so when you bring people in, yes, they have to raise the bar from their pure themselves as an IC or as a manager, but what we also think about is, âHow do they impact future hiring? Is this person likely to make it easier or harder for us to recruit more people that raise the bar?â And so they can do that a couple of different ways. So some people are, tactically, they come in and they act as recruiters. They come in and they have great networks and they bring people along and everyone wants to follow them.
And that is a big part of what we think about when we bring people in is like, âAre they somebody that brings people with them, brings high caliber people with them?â So thatâs at the top level, someone who actually brings the people along. And then thereâs also like, âOkay, but maybe theyâre not going to bring a bunch of folks along. Maybe theyâre more junior, but do they make it more likely that when we have somebody visit, when we have somebody do an onsite, do they make it more likely that that person joins, whether because they bring a level of energy, enthusiasm, kindness? Are they just so incredibly talented that people want to work with them because of their caliber?â So we think about people through that lens of, âDo they actually help us recruit either actually by being a recruiter-â
Turner Novak:
Physically or-
Jake Stauch:
Or just like, âBecause theyâre here, weâre more likely to get the next person that weâre really excited about.â
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Yeah, itâs one of those things. Thereâs different ways, too. Maybe theyâre a very high profile person where everyone will see the news article or the LinkedIn update and be curious, or itâs literally just they could text five people that they worked with in the past and just bring them all over.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah. Or theyâre just so much fun and they bring this lively energy to the office. Youâre like, âOh, I canât wait for this person to have lunch with my candidates because my candidates are going to meet this person and theyâre going to decide to join.â And the flip side is true. Somebody could be very, very good, but we feel like, âYou know what? I donât know if I want this person to have lunch with our candidates. And I donât know if after that lunch experience, the candidateâs going to be more likely to join the company.â And so we really think about that lens when we evaluate people.
Turner Novak:
You ever watch the Silicon Valley show?
Jake Stauch:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
You know Gilfoyle?
Jake Stauch:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
Heâs a super talented engineer, but a candidate might be interviewing, heâs like, âDonât work here. This place is terrible,â or something. You donât want to scare people away.
Jake Stauch:
Yeah, exactly.
Turner Novak:
Well, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.
Jake Stauch:
Thank you so much. This was a blast.
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