This episode features an interview with Koti Reddy, Chief Technology Officer for Conga. Conga is the global leader in commercial operations transformation, helping businesses automate the process of creating quotes, contracts and documents. We talk with Koti about building complex pricing algorithms, smart contracts, and making data-based decisions.
This episode features an interview with Koti Reddy, Chief Technology Officer for Conga. Conga is the global leader in commercial operations transformation, helping businesses automate the process of creating quotes, contracts and documents. We talk with Koti about building complex pricing algorithms, smart contracts, and making data-based decisions.
3 Takeaways:
Key Quotes:
Bio:
Koti Reddy is a technical leader with 20 years of experience in managing enterprise and SaaS product development. He leads a multi-continental, multi-cultural team of 300 highly skilled engineers to implement world-class, scalable designs. Before taking on the role of CTO, Koti served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Conga, using his expertise in engineering, R&D and other operations to grow Conga’s business. Prior to joining Conga, Koti was SVP of CallidusCloud and took charge of all product development and cloud operations.
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Lauren: Hi everybody. We have another awesome episode of Truth Be Known today. We have Koti Reddy, the chief technology officer at Conga with us. Koti, thanks for coming on the show.
Koti: Thanks, Lauren, for inviting me.
Lauren: It is a real pleasure to have you. Conga is the global leader in commercial operations transformation. It is an incredible company, but before we get into that, Koti, I'd love to hear about how you got started in tech.
Koti: Yeah, some parts of it may sound very stereotypical, Lauren, and it's like a... a guy grow up in India, like to study engineering and like where do you heard you had abroad? But that's the stereotypical part of it. But then I took a little detour before I ended up in U.S. I went to Australia to do my masters in RMIT, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. And that's where I got into from there. I was doing electronics and communication engineering when I did in India. Moved into a computer science side. And I took my post-graduate diploma, and I started my career software right in Australia and, moved to U.S. In '98. And, arrived at the Mecca of software in Silicon Valley in 2000. And from there, here I am for 20 plus years and working in Bay Area.
Lauren: What got you to leave the beautiful sunshine of Australia for the Bay Area and for the states?
Koti: If I say this, you are going to laugh about it. So, like I am the youngest in the family and, I went to Australia and like any immigrant, you're trying to get the permanent residency and that process started in Australia and it's going on for ever and ever. Don't laugh when I say this, I missed my mother. And the way, the best way that I felt like I could go to India was to have a Plan B, because I cannot go back to Australia. So, I applied for work with U.S. And then I got the work visa. I told the guys who gave me the work visa I'm going to go to India, see my mom, and then come to U.S. And come here. So, there is no technical, like a grand reason why I ended up in U.S. I just wanted to see my mom so desperately badly. So, coming U.S. Is the path to...
Lauren: I love that.
Koti: No, I wish I can give you a big technical reason for me to move to Silicon Valley, but no.
Lauren: Your mom secretly knew you were meant to be in Silicon Valley. So, she orchestrated the entire thing.
Koti: I guess.
Lauren: Okay. And tell me, what have you what's what have you been working on recently at Conga?
Koti: Eight, nine years back, we have defined the space between a CRM and ERP, and we called the many names. Corporate cash made a law office and commercial operations, revenue, operations you name it. Conga, has, been a pioneer in this area and defined the space. And to have done it. And so, I look at the phases that we were in. We were in a phase of, how do you bring this data models together and have the data connected from the CRM till the ERP using our solutions. But now we got into the next phase, and we call it more like a smart contract, some smart pricing, and commercial operations. So, some of the things that we are working are the risk analysis in the contracts. How do you, while you are working in the contracts that their data intelligence will give you pointers about Hey, make sure you have, this clause that you are reviewing. This is outside of what we generally agree. How do you bring that knowledge while the contracts are negotiated? How do you bring the pricing intelligence into when you are trying to build a quote how much you can do rebates? And like when you cross the line of not making profit. So, all this smartness we are introducing. And in addition to that one of the things like Lauren, you know this this more than anybody dealing with the data, is that nature of the data and the growth of the data is growing exponentially. Previously, if a customer says, I want to look at something and then process the data to give me a result, you can take that same requirement that was there any years ago. Today, it is more like 20, 30 X. More data to process to give it a result. One of the key things that we deal with is a build complex configurations and complex pricing algorithms that we deal with. Part of our, CPQ solution. We have built what we call turbo engines. Where it takes a massive amount of data and processes, millions of, pricing rules and configuration rules in few seconds between five to 10 seconds and provide the results. So that's a pricing engine and configuration engine side we are building. It's going very well. Those are some of the things that like we are working on and, exciting, how we are going about doing these things and we are getting a great feedback from our customers.
Lauren: That's awesome. And I can only imagine when you were trying to process this and pulling that much data that quickly, the idea of, accuracy of your data and then the health and trustability of your data must be critical if you're pulling in all of these different sources and you need to produce quotes that quickly.
Koti: Yup. Previously like pre people used to say, yeah, I'll start generating the quote and I'll go and get a coffee and the quote will be ready and it didn't bother them. It used to be the business process used to be, hey, you asked me to build a quote and I'll get back to you in couple of days. That used to be acceptable business process back in the day. If you say like it takes 12 seconds today to generate the quote, I get an escalation call from one of our premium customers and say, why is it so slow? Like, why can't we make it like under five seconds? So, I think like the world has changed and for better.
Lauren: Absolutely the constant sort of speed of innovation and transformation just keeps going and going. And I can only imagine there's going to be a point where waiting five seconds for a quote's too long. And now it's, I just, I click the button. Why doesn't it just appear?
Koti: Exactly. Exactly. I think it’s amazing. And I think that the elastic ness and the scalability is becoming more and more of a requirement for any solutions that we bring.
Lauren: Can you tell me about ways that you're pulling in data throughout your life, through your career right now? What are all the ways data is working?
Koti: Yeah. Let me start the careers part, and then we'll really get to the personal side of things. Anybody who's in a senior leadership, you bring some of that experience to the table. And you make the decisions, you can call it like, okay, you need to go with your gut feel, you need to do this, you need to that. But like whenever you hear that, you may make an assumption or is it like, just based on experience you are making decisions? No, actually what you are doing is, if you think of the modern world of machine learning and AI, you are, instead of the artificial intelligence, you are using your own intelligence, but like the decisions, even these gut feel and you're making calls, these are all data-based decisions. For example, if you have a feature that you need to build for every, engineering team you'll have a limited amount of resources and time. You need to figure out like, look, I want to build this feature. Is it useful for a hundred of my customers? Or is it useful for two of my customers? And you answer that question and then you make a call, or you make a call saying, I'm going to do it for these two of these customers, because I'm going to acquire 200 after two times two customers that I have. So, I'm getting ahead of it. And that data in case of commercial operations, that we actually take the sales opportunity and help them to close that opportunity, so part of that is like all the data that comes with that and the products and the catalogs and the contracts. All of these things we put together in our quote to cash flow. And also, how does the finances work? How do they invoice? How do they bill? And everything in between. So, we are making data-based decisions, not only in our applications, but we are also directing our customers based on the data. Then it comes to personal side, of using the data. Me and my wife are both engineers. So, I think maybe it is built into that. And there is no other way. I think I actually maybe a little bit more emotional than my wife where she's much more logical and like very data driven. But like most of the things we were going through my younger daughter's college admission process this year. And she's heading to college, later this summer. When we were going through that admission process, okay, what's the percentage acceptance rate? And what is the college that she is trying to, what is the course she is trying to graduate on? What special colleges she wants to go into in that specialization? And then you insert the personal requirements she has. I don't want to go to too small off campus. Okay. Now you've eliminated some. I want one sports team not to suck. Like she needs a good sports team. So, we add that into the criteria. And oh, I don't want to go to some college in West Coast. I'm too close to you guys. So, she doesn't want to do You insert that. Like now if you look at it, it's a decision engine. And you are operating based on the data. And you apply that data, and you filter down. And then she found eight colleges. And out of that, she said this is my dream college. I applied for Duke, and she got in. Congratulations to her and she did a great job, but like you apply that data every day. And sometimes it is hard to see that you are doing all this data driven decisions. But, yeah, I looked at that and say yeah, that’s how the software works. That's how the computers work. That's how the artificial intelligence is born, and machine learning is what it is doing is crunching these numbers. Yeah. that's how I use the data in everyday life, either as work or personal.
Lauren: Love that. We had a guest on the show, a couple of months ago and we were talking about data driven decisions. And when he got excited about working with data and he was like, I've always been working with data. That's just this is how I run my life since I was a little kid and how you use all of these bits of information to make decisions. And it's absolutely right. It's not a new concept at work. It's just, we have a lot more information now.
Koti: Yeah. And I think like we are just looking at it as like a more data decision. Previously we used to just call it decisions. And I think we are data aware from a thinking perspective.
Lauren: So, is your daughter going to be an engineer as well? Or is she going to buck the trend and be an artist or a writer?
Koti: It's funny, like we have two daughters and we asked them what are you going to study? They both say one thing. We're not going to do what you both do. That much they know. She’s, still going to be an engineer, but like more in biomedical. She's going into biomedical engineering. Yeah, my older daughter went into the economic side of things. She went to London School of Economics and studied international relations. So, like they both are not engineers and not software people. That much for sure.
Lauren: Nice. But both completely brilliant and going, I want to use numbers and data and logical thinking, but not like my parents. Cause no one wants to do with their parents do.
Koti: Exactly.
Lauren: When they get older, they'll realize their parents actually had the coolest jobs, but you'd never that with your parents. Okay. No. The role of children is to make sure you realize you're not cool.
Koti: Exactly. Exactly.
Lauren: So, jumping to the work side, I’m familiar with what you do. But I think, the audience would love to hear a little bit more about the commercial operation space. And then, you talked about how you're helping businesses make better use of their data. But if you want to dig into commercial operations, how Conga does what it does and then,
Koti: Definitely. So, I think, Commercial operations it’s an ocean. Like where do you start and where do So whenever I explain, I try to define, a process that starts from a sales person creating an opportunity. And going through the whole, revenue, process. And most of the companies, when we, talk to them, the way that we defined the commercial operation is how do you create a proposal and create a quote from there? How do you negotiate and execute a contract? How do you do the fulfillment? How do you do the revenue management and how do you do the renewals? And then you start the whole process of a proposal to quote. It's like a little circular, in some ways. It's a very broad area. And when we look at ourselves, we are pioneering the commercial operations. Even we have a lot of whitespaces that's within the solutions that we offer. When we go and talk to our customers, we don’t, try to just sell, here is all the solutions that we have. We try to take our customers through the transformation that is required far for them to run a commercial operation. So, when they do that, the transformation is not easy. The customers that has to go through this transformations, we help them with the solutions that we have, and we have a maturity model that we define and help customers where exactly part of that transformation they are and what are all the solutions that they can actually get it from us. And we have given a mechanism to say, how do you go through this transformation? And because like, when somebody signs up for these big digital transformations, project slot, and the statistics show 50% of the digital transformations fail. The reason is when you try to take a big bite out of that to apple of digital transformation, you may not be able to chew at one time. So, we try to help our customer based on where they are from a digitally, we will try to help them using our maturity model. So that's what we do. And we also use lot of data to help them. So how much of your contracting process is automated? How much you negotiate from a red lining perspective? How much of your pricing, matrices are different? How is your bundling structure? How about your catalogs and products that are defined and defined Based on that, we can offer a simple solution of what we call a document generation product? Our composite will be sufficient when you are early part of the maturity process. And then you have a basic contracts solution. If they are a little farther, we will suggest them take the composer and use our CPQ solution along with the contracts. And when somebody is so advanced, we ask them to use the, AI based contracting solution, along with our CPQ and our composer. So, we work with our customers and that’s how we define it. But this is all very many data driven. How do customers take the data? And actually, we take their data and part of our selling process, our product marketing team goes and helps them to look at their level of maturity and applying their data towards our maturity model and help them. So that's how we use the data to help the businesses and help them to transform.
Lauren: What do you think, are going to be the biggest changes in commercial operations in CPQ in the next five to 10 years?
Koti: So, like I was saying, we didn't even call it commercial operations early on, but we defined this area between, CRM and ERP eight years ago. What we have been doing is, we created this data model that gives them the visibility from the beginning to the end. And they also can actually, connect the dots when the opportunity comes to the revenue, come through the door. That has been what we have been doing for the last eight years or so and everything. But coming five-years, I just want to use the word smart, maybe a little bit too used, but we want, our, customers that have been using the solution like the new customers that are coming into this ecosystem, we want them to be able to make the smart decisions based on data. And how they have signed up for business and how they are dealing with their customers. And based on that data, how it is helping them to make the smarter decisions and analytics and AI to build decision support. For example, giving a contracting saying, hey, I'm signing a three-year deal. I would like to know if I'm signing a contract for three years, with my customer. If they get out of the contract after one year with the no, penalty or no, nothing attached, you may still agree for it. But you need to know that before you sign the contract. You can go and review it line by line that we have been doing 12 years ago. Or You can have a smart risk analysis contract solution that can point you to that and say, are you comfortable here? Because we don't sign a three-year contract with, one year out. And just giving you a point, you may sign with this customer, but you just need to know. So, we are heading more towards that, and we are heading more towards how you become smarter from a pricing perspective, smarter from a rebate perspective. How much discounts you can give? Like when you bundle it, how do you upsell some of the maintenance contract or a services contract along with your product? So, all that smartness is taking off and previously these are predictive analytical based solutions. saying when you do this ad, this bundle is business knowledge incorporated into rules. But like what we want to enhance that business knowledge is data, based, knowledge also given to the businessperson, along with their business knowledge. Okay. You five out of your 10 salespeople sold these five products along with those two products, when they sold it. Now you have a bigger opportunity to increase the revenue coming in. So those are the kinds of things that in the next five to 10 years, we are going to get into the AI station support, smart contracts, and smart pricing.
Lauren: What do you think some of the most innovative things your customers are going to be able to do because of it?
Koti: Okay. We are seeing right now, there is a smart search feature that we just introduced. Customers have these contracts that they have been using for eight years, nine years. And it's in the repository and it’s been there, and they go customer by customer and search something and they find out. What we have released recently was a smart search feature. And said, you just type in English, like whatever you want to. In a verbal, natural language processing where you just say, show me the contracts that are greater than $5,000 and have a force majeure clause, and expiring this year. It goes and it translates it, and it's finds all the contracts and highlights those terms and give it to them that is across all the repository that they have. This will help them especially in the pandemic time. We have seen customers say show me the contracts with force majeure and one of our big customers used that kind of, capability and able to get a much better insights into the data. And pricing optimization, is another area and, just, using their own data. That's the power of data, right? Like you’re not trying to make decisions by some global data, like some, data you can purchase it’s your data, look at your data and make the decisions that is required for your business. Like whenever a customer comes back and tells you that, that gives you wind in your sails for you to get onto the next one and next feature and the next feature.
Lauren: Totally. So, what's been your favorite part about getting involved in this industry? Like what excites you every day?
Koti: Yeah, so it's funny like the job before this, Lauren was in sales, commissions, like CallidusCloud is where I've worked. It got acquired by sales SAP. They were industry leader in sales commissions. How do you pay the salespeople commissions? And the way that I have looked at that, and we used to call it sales performance management, and Salesforce automation is a big, domain. And when I started with the sales commission and then we expanded at, Callidus we use call it a lead to money. Sales lead coming into sales spots and seeing the money, and it is having a commercial operations product like CPQ, CLM, along with sales commissions. I used to work with, at Callidus when I came here, I started focusing on the other side of the sales commission. Overall, I've been, in the sales performance and sales force automation area for the last 20 plus years. I look at it as my most exciting thing in my job is, I love working with the business software and I love seeing the customers getting an ROI on the investment they make in the software. So, if you think about any business, so in Silicon Valley, you can always say the most exciting thing is you innovate the features, you build an awesome product. But only thing that makes the ball rolling is salespeople selling. And if you look at the CPQ, you look at the CLM in the past, I've worked on the sales commission. All of these make the sales process and salespeople and companies more efficient in earning the business and doing the business. So that’s the most exciting part of what I do every day. And I get a big kick out of business software and ROI. It may sound weird. I'll use all the social media ones for my personal use, but I'll get a big kick out of ROI for businesses.
Lauren: That is not weird at all. It's the knowing you're having a material impact on so many companies and on all your customers and helping them grow and do great business is exciting and fulfilling.
Koti: Yep. Yep. It absolutely is.
Lauren: And one of the things I love about Talend is the impact we have on our customers. And knowing that our customers can grow their business faster. New customers in the healthcare space that can save more lives because of our software and our ability to connect different data sources, transform the data and give, businesses access to that data in real time. And just seeing the results and the impact on customers is so exciting and so fulfilling. It’s the way of giving back.
Koti: Yeah, no I used or Talend in between Callidus and. Conga. I, scratch each off doing something on my own for a couple of years before I got back to Conga. I was building in the salespeople area; sales engagement platform is what I used to call it. So, one of the things is like how do you get the data into the application that I was building? The thing that I picked up quickly and able to use with Talend was able to with all the connectors and the data sources, it can connect so quickly. So, I was able to like, with a three-man team that we were doing were able to get up and running so quickly. And, yeah, you guys play a very critical role in that, like connecting all those data sources. you should be proud of that.
Lauren: Thank you. We feel the same way. To be able to tie in all your data in one place, to make sure that data is clean, compliant, to make sure you can trust the data and be able to make business decisions on it. And that's really what everything goes to, is how can we make businesses run faster, run better, and make better decisions. There's a sense of sort of adrenaline and excitement and fulfillment around that.
Koti: Yep. Absolutely.
Lauren: So, this is one of my favorite things I get to ask, people who come onto the show. So, what's one of the most difficult decisions you've had to make in your career?
Koti: This is the work example that I give you, when I started in 2000 in Callidus everyone starts software and licensing and everything. We changed, into a multi-tenant SaaS business in 2008. So, like any engineering team, now you have to re-engineer, re-architect, the solution. So, I took a shortcut. I took a shortcut, like knowing. That there is a timeline, right? Everybody has a timeline. I have six months to react and release the V1 and we took a shortcut. And we were thinking we can get past that shortcut. We can cover it up. If I look back, especially when you are building a foundational piece like a multi-tenant SaaS solution, that is going to be there for the next 10, 12 years, or beyond, you need to be careful in taking a shortcut that saves two months. I wish I have gone and, had a strong conversation to convince my CTO. And I didn’t pull up my socks for that fight.
Lauren: Yep.
Koti: And I went with the timeline-based decision or assess the right technical decision that would scale. It took many years for us to dig out of that hole. So, these are the difficult decisions that you make, but one you learn from every day. We are trying to build a platform for us to go beyond salesforce now. How can we work with other CRMs? That lesson from 2008 is still fresh in my head. I know for sure I'm not taking shortcuts. It may take a couple of months more, a couple of million more, but we are not taking the shortcut.
Lauren: You are so right. In the moment, it's that rush to get done. What are the things we can do? But it just doesn't pay off and spending that little bit more time, that little bit more money... It seems like forever when you're going through it, but it's not. And you build better product, you do better work, you have better results. So, I think that is an excellent lesson.
Koti: Yeah, absolutely.
Lauren: So, I have really enjoyed the conversation. So, I get to ask, a bunch of quick decision questions that I don't think were shared with you ahead of time. As much as we like to do deep data-driven decisions, these are meant to be questions you can answer quickly, so don't overthink
Koti: Yeah.
Lauren: So, what is one talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Koti: I would say like a consensus-based leadership, right? So, I don't like me telling my team, somebody telling me what to do. I always want to build a consensus of why we are doing it and what we are trying to achieve, then actually executing that is much easier. And that's my style of leadership. And I don't think it will reflect if you open my LinkedIn resume, but like it'll only come to the front if you're talking to 10 people that worked with me.
Lauren: So, if you weren't an engineer, and you weren’t in tech, what would you be doing?
Koti: One of two things. I’d be a politician. Because I love working with people and doing something for people. And I know we all think like politics is dirty. But if you don't get in and clean it up, you have no right to criticize something as dirty. So that was my motto back from, for a long time. If I weren't in tech, that's what I would have. Second thing is hospitality business. Because when I see a smile on somebody's face, that’s a million-dollar value for me. So, like I would have been one of those two.
Lauren: Awesome. I love that. And it's funny. When you talked about consensus driven leadership, you can tell that you really love getting people bought in and bringing people together. And until you described the two things, I went, you know what? Politics is all about finding compromise and getting people together and driving results that make for a better world and community. And it's the same thing with restaurants. It is, how do you bring people together and provide these positive experiences? I would never think the two were related until you described it. And I went, I totally get this. And I can completely understand your leadership style.
Koti: Thank you.
Lauren: What is your, either a book, a podcast, a TV show, something you've been binge watching lately or reading?
Koti: Yeah, so part of the COVID thing, like we started in November, and I think it lasted till March. We ran through West Wing, every single episode of West Wing. I think like it was 145 episodes, something like that. And then I watched one episode, two episodes and I get to the third one and the here is where child become parent and parent will become child. And my younger one is like Daddy, we watched two already. Let's stop now. And I must bargain. Can I watch one more show? She said no. We are doing tomorrow night. Let's stop right now. No. yeah, West Wing. We watched all West Wing and after we ran out of that, I always want the drama and thriller. So, we've been watching FBI show. It's like Law and Order, a little bit more bullets and more bulletproof vests, things that's what we've been watching.
Lauren: Very cool. I it's funny TV shows now aren't that many episodes. That's the problem with TV now. They're 10-episode seasons. I missed the like 20, 25-episode seasons.
Koti: Exactly.
Lauren: And last question. What piece of advice would you give yourself? Your younger version of yourself?
Koti: So, I look at this whole 50 years of my life. I wouldn't change a thing myself, like personally speaking. But when I think about what you ask, there is a TV show when my older daughter was a two-year-old, we used to watch. It's called Little Bear, the TV show called Little Bear. And so, the mama bear tells this little bear every time, rushing and running around or whatever, the momma bear tells like a slowdown little bear, that’s what I tell my younger self. I wanted to tell myself listen, process, respond. Like I used to, before you finish the question, I used to answer it like assuming the parts of the question you are about to ask I am competitive and want to win and want to move, make progress and, showcase myself. But all over the years, I learned listening solves much more problems than you're solving it yourself. So, I would say slow down a little bit, Koti.
Lauren: That is awesome. I hope your team realizes what a great leader that they have. The thing I've learned about management and leading teams is no one will ever tell you're doing a great job. It's just like parenting. So, I hope that your team comes in and appreciates you.
Okay.
Koti: Thank you, Lauren. And my team is great, and I’m blessed. I've been a leader 18 years out of the last 22 years I've been working. I'm blessed with the greatest teams, in the world. And a lot of team members tell me they've worked the hardest and they work the longest hours. They have the most fun in the years they worked for me. And I think that's the best way any manager can get a credit from the people that are in their team, those three words. Work the hardest, work the longest and have a lot of fun. So, what more can you ask?
Lauren: That's the way it is. Those are the memories that we look back going, I didn't realize those were the best moments of my career, but wow.
Koti: Yeah
Lauren: thank you so much for joining the show, for being part of this with us. I'm happy to have you on.
Koti: Thank you, Lauren. And very nice meeting you and look forward to having some similar conversation soon,
Lauren: Absolutely.
Koti: Talk to you soon. Bye.