BRYAN MURPHY

>> Craig Gould: Bryan Murphy, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Bryan you’re the CEO of Smartling, an AI powered platform that automates, manages and professionally translates content across devices and platforms, enabling companies to extend their global reach faster and cheaper than ever before. I’m excited to talk to you because it is a market that I’m not sure I quite understood the size and scope of. And what, you’re doing with AI is exciting for a number of reasons. Bryan I love to start these conversations with one common question, which is, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Bryan Murphy: Well, I guess, let’s see. Well, I, I started my first company when I was 12 years old and it was a, a pie baking business, because I love pie, still do. And, and I lived in a neighborhood that had been a cherry and apple orchard. And I kept thinking like, oh, here’s all this beautiful, delicious fruit that’s just falling to the ground. I would like to go, like, I want to go pick it and make pies. And that’s what I did. So it became this business where I had a 100% close rate. You know, who’s not going to, you know, knock on the door, hey, can I, you know your cherries are in bloom. Can I? Mind if I pick them? Oh, what are you going to do with it? I bake pies. Never lost a sale.

>> Craig Gould: Wow.

>> Bryan Murphy: it was a great business. It was, almost 100% gross margin. I got my mom and my sister working for me for free. So it was great business.

>> Craig Gould: Were you cooking the pies with the people’s own fruit and selling it back to them?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yes, yes. In charge of six bucks. Of six bucks a pie. Back then, that was a pretty good rate for a pie. But, but it was, it was great business. It taught me a lot, you know, at 12 years old, I mean, I had that little green book, you remember the little green ledgers, right. You know, and I. To track my, my receipts and I had to track my expenses. And then what was my net and 12 years old, that was just like. So being, being in business, like we’re kind of talking earlier about passions and what are you good at? I just feel like, you know, running businesses just always been both a passion and something I think I’m, cut out to do.

>> Craig Gould: I, I think the story goes that even when you got out into the professional care, quote unquote career world, you still had that itch, you know, And I think I’ve heard you say before that you Know, sometimes being young you’re too naive to even know what you shouldn’t even be throwing up against the wall. Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yes.

>> Craig Gould: Can you talk about that first larger scale startup that you kind of threw yourself into in the corporate world?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah. So one of the great things about being young is you, you hopefully you have very little fear of failure.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: I just, all I really cared about is did I have enough beer money and you know, to be able to go on a ski trip every year and pay my rent. and so I had very low needs and I just once again starting with the buy business. The other businesses just wanted to grow businesses. So we, my, my partner, my cousin and I, we started this business called Wrenched. And we actually, we ended up growing that to a two and a half billion dollar business selling auto parts online. And I just remember one funny story about that business. Talking about you know, kind of like thoughts of failure or whatever is we went down to visit with the leadership team of autozone, down at their big headquarters. We walked into a conference room, about the biggest conference room you ever seen overlooking the Mississippi river. And there’s probably 20 people in this room, all executives from, from AutoZone. And we told them what we were going to do, that we were going to start this online business and we were going to sell auto parts online. And Johnny Adams was the CEO I think he kind of sat back and he looked and he just chuckled and he said, boys, ain’t no way people are going to buy auto parts online. And the whole room just started laughing. My partner Gus just kind of walked out of the room going, oh boy, we really might have stepped into it but lo and behold they did. And so we solved a couple of pain points for the consumer and the professional and ended up growing that into a really tremendous business.

>> Craig Gould: And that wound up turning into time at ebay, right?

>> Bryan Murphy: That’s right. So we ended up developing a partnership with ebay and then ended up selling the business to eBay. EBay. And I spent just about four years there and it was one of those things where I, I kind of expected to spend the first year there and then go back and run another company. Just John Dono talked, talked me into coming back and, and, and staying. I’m glad he did because it was really one of the greatest experiences, that I had because I’d had a lot of entrepreneurial founder experience but I hadn’t had like that, ah, kind of like you know, publicly traded global sort of Corporate experience. And so for me, every day was like training day. I was just gobbling up, just learning as much as I could about each one of the functions because each one of the functions in the business had like the best of the best, like super smart, super well trained people and just learned as much as I could over those years and learn how to operate. Probably the biggest thing is, taught me how to operate at scale and what that meant. And that was a really incredible experience for me.

>> Craig Gould: I think that’s always one of the more intriguing things about the founder, CEOs, like Bezos or Zuckerberg. You know, the idea that at one point it was a team of two people and then some point you have a team of 20,000 people. And how even as a manager, how do you scale your skill set to go from being the guy coding to what it takes to manage a company at that scale?

>> Bryan Murphy: It is. And that’s one of the big transitions and I think that’s where a lot of people can get stuck. because you have to be, you have to go from being a master of like this thing, right? To being able to operate across all of these things. And it means giving up control, right? And it means building teams, of really hiring great talent. And it means being a very good communicator, like all of those things. And also means thinking big. and I, you know, it was funny. I, I learned this lesson at ebay. I remember, I think I had a goal of, I had to generate like $6 billion and incremental GMV or something for for the business in one of my last years there. And I came back with this plan of like a hundred small things that added up. I was really proud. Spent like six weeks building. Got it. You know, here’s my six billion. It’s made up of 100 points and Devin Winig, who was president of ebay at the time, he looked at me and said, he said, there’s no way that this organization is going to be, have any interest or any capability of doing a hundred of these things. Go back and come back to me in two weeks with, a list of six initiatives that can get you the, the dollars. And I was like, oh my God. So, went back, hustled with the team and we did, we got it down. And a really important teaching moment for me was, you know, and this is kind of my rule now is like, I don’t think organizations can do more than three to five things tops, right? Some people say it’s less Than that, I guess this my add kicking in. But three to five is sort of the number no one could keep any more than that, sort of like on their plate and, and keep those plates spinning effectively. And so you get too diluted. So you really have to, you have to think I, I need things that are going to move the needle in a very big material way. Not just work or be good. That’s not enough. It’s got to be like this. If I’m a 100 million dollar business, these are the things I need to be, to get to be a 500 million dollar business. And I’m probably thinking too small even then, you know what I mean? But like if I’m a 50 million dollar, how do I get to be a 250? It’s like you gotta, you gotta keep kind of thinking about how do I change this business, like multiple step levels. And I think as a CEO in particular, you’ve got to be thinking that way and helping your team shape.

>> Craig Gould: Those, those plans, your time at Smartling. And I want to dive into exactly what you guys doing because you know, I think one of the exciting things about smartling is that obviously we know that everyone’s pouring money into AI and we, and we see the numbers, we see the hiring numbers, we see all the investment. But we’re starting to hear little things in the media about companies not seeing a payoff from their AI investments. But then I look at somebody like Smartling, what, you know, the capabilities and the, the growth and profitability for you internally and what that means for your customers, AI is kind of unlocked, an X factor for not only smartling, but for your customers.

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. And so, a couple of things here. So smartling is an AI translation business. What we do is we help our customers, which tend to be enterprises like IBM, Disney, Verizon, Pepsi, et cetera, create multilingual experiences for their customers globally.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: To accelerate growth. and so these are, we create, we translate websites, we translate applications, technical, documentation, anything that’s kind of customer facing that needs to be in the language of their customer. Right. And so why is this important? And it’s important because I always, I keep laughing. It’s like I just was, I’m working on this other conversation right now and this concept of personalization just came up and I’m like, how much time and money do we as marketers spend on chasing that, you know, that holy grail of creating the perfect personalized content for our customer, whether it’s B2B, B2C we spend jillions of dollars, right? And what’s the ultimate personalization language? Like, right? So I could be doing all this work getting the ICP right and Personas right. But if I have to, if this person’s French and I’m talking to them in English, forget about it, you’re out.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: So what’s fascinating is that, 40% of, 40% of people won’t buy if the content is not in their language, right? So which kind of makes sense, like, right, I’m not going to go to, I, I can’t, I can’t speak German very well. So I, I can’t go to a German website and buy shoes. 65 prefer it to be in their language, et cetera, et cetera. Yet all the Internet, the world’s Internet, less than 20% speak English. You see what I’m saying? So like, and even the United States, I’ll tell you this, I’ll ask you a question. How many, what, how many languages do you think, do you think are spoken in the United States?

>> Craig Gould: Well, the number’s probably triple digits, but I’ll just go lowball and say, because I think in our minds we just kind of think, oh, well, it’s, it’s English, Spanish and then a sprinkling. But I’m guessing it’s probably, probably closer to, I’d say 20 on the low side, maybe 100 on the high side.

>> Bryan Murphy: It’s amazing. I love this question. It’s over 400.

>> Craig Gould: Oh, wow.

>> Bryan Murphy: Over 400. it’s, it’s just fascinating how many languages are spoken around the world, especially now, because it’s becoming a very global place. So long story short is, you know, why translate and localize and why smartly? back at ebay, we used to think a lot about digital footprint, right? So how much digital content do I have in each one of my target countries? And what’s the engagement level? Right, because that drives organic traffic, which is sort of the backbone of a lot of things we did.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: So they need to be engaging and there need to be enough content. That’s what drives direct and organic, super important. And also by the way, drives conversion rate, etc. So, what we have found is, so really we’re in the game of helping our customers create as much content, engaging content as they can in their target markets cost effectively, Right? So by being able to do, deliver this automated AI translation, we’re able to, deliver translation for a fraction of the cost and turnaround time of a traditional language, service Provider, which is what the $50 billion, you know, translation localization market is predicated on. It’s like that traditional thing. What we do is new and the AI Trans automated translation platform, on brand, extremely high quality, quality guaranteed. Which is essential. Right. Because you have to have a good, positive brand experience and allows our customers to kind of create the ultimate personalization of that content at scale. And when you factor in the fact that we can improve translate, conversion rates by between 20 and 70%. Conversion rate.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: Between 20 and 70% by localizing that content, that’s a massive unlock of growth.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: and E.B. i would have killed for, like we used to talk about BIPs, right. How much do we improve the conversion rate with this change? Oh, seven bips. Amazing.

>> Speaker C: All right.

>> Bryan Murphy: But 20 to 70% is huge. And.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: So that’s why these big companies have, they figured this out. And so what we’re really in the business of doing is helping them scale that or, do that translation at scale and fast. So we’re AI translation turns around about 400 times faster than traditional.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: Which is once again a secret weapon. So that’s really, really what we’re in the business of doing for our customers.

>> Craig Gould: I was thinking about this before our call. I remember during the financial crisis 10, 15 years ago, you know, the, the economy was suffering. And I remember one of the things that fast food restaurants started doing was they started opening places that had never opened for breakfast. Started opening for breakfast because they, they have the sunk cost. How can they grow in a shrinking market? Well, they can grow by offering breakfast. You know, it makes me think, in this case, for a large company, how’s a way where they can get an incremental growth? Well, maybe we can extend to a geographic region that we haven’t gone to before. And how can we do that? How can we, you know, take our online business and get an extra 10% of growth by going to someplace new? And that’s where smartling is able to enable that, right?

>> Bryan Murphy: It is. And the world’s a very different place than it was even 15, 20 years ago. 15, 20 years ago I could launch a startup and I could stay in my country and probably do pretty well. so there was an element of a growth story, but now it’s almost a defensive tactic. So what happens if I come up with a good idea and I launch this company? I’m immediately going to have competitors in seven different countries.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: And now it becomes a scale game because either one of those companies can displace Me and globally. Right. So it’s not just a growth game now. it’s an arms race. So post series B, post series C, part of the playbook is, okay, what countries are you going to expand into? Because you can’t have your German, you know, copy or your, you know, whatever company, ah, that does the same thing in another country, come into your North America or German market, whichever, you know, wherever you are. So, it’s an, it’s an essential. Not only is it essential for growth, because you’re exactly right, because it just significantly increases that TAM for you, but also it’s essential for preservation. Right, because someone else is going to come after you in your home country sooner than later.

>> Craig Gould: So it’s as much a defensive, strategy as it is offensive.

>> Bryan Murphy: That’s correct. That’s correct. You have to be in the major regions.

>> Craig Gould: Take me back to you coming to Smartling and what Smartling was before. Because Smartling was using machine learning before you showed up before November of 22 when ChatGPT launches. Your arrival at Smartling, you’re not a founder like you have been in other companies. You, I believe it was tied to like a PE investment from battery. What excited you about the opportunity to step into Smartling? Because they’re not selling auto parts. What did you see there that you, you thought, you know what, I think I can, I can add value.

>> Bryan Murphy: So I’ve known battery for several, you know, dozen years now or so. And so from time to time we get involved to help them think about different, industries we might get into. they called me, it was about four years ago now, and they said, hey, we’re looking at this $50 billion translation localization space. Some technology companies in there, we helped help us take a look. And I said, yeah, sure, like let’s do it. So, the more I look, the more I got excited. and we settled in on Smartly precisely because of what you just mentioned. They had a cloud native translation, ah, management application. Really good at machine learning, really good at doing neural, machine, neural machine translation. So the way to think about it was at the time, it’s like, we were really good at doing things faster, cheaper, but not better. Okay. but I saw the potential for us to solve, to solve that other problem, the go to market problem, and, and really make a dent in this 50, billion dollar market. Because the way I looked, I’m like, okay, so the traditional SP is charging like 20 cents a word and it’s this like, okay, extract the content, put it in the email, da da da, like mail around. It’s like oh my God, this is like 1980s. and here’s this company that automates 99 of the translation can do it super inexpensively and good, not, not perfect.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: let’s figure out, let’s get into that business and figure out how we can improve the go to market motion and see if we can’t solve this other problem which is getting it good enough. and we got a little bit lucky in that journey. So lots of things were going right. The lucky bit is that OpenAI releases GPT and immediately we saw the potential. We saw holy smokes, this thing, we bolt this thing in and it can help us solve certain linguistic problems that neuro machine translation could not or wasn’t good at doing. and so bolting those two things together kind of like the peanut butter and the chocolate get you the Reese’s or whatever allowed us now to do things faster, better, faster, cheaper and better.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: And that was the, that’s been the huge unlock. So now this is a business that’s you know, growing, you know, 40, 50%, you know, great margins, all that kind of thing. And largely because once again we can, we can help these global companies grow faster by helping them personalize content into by localizing it into their target markets.

>> Craig Gould: Probably the highest tier still involves human interaction just to make sure that things are being worded correctly there. And there are also, there are cultural things, right, that you know, if you’re translating, translating is different than localization, right? Word to word, it isn’t going to cut it because there, there’s a whole cultural thing there. I heard you say in an interview that before the LLM, the AI insertion, 80% of the, the work was involving the human translators working on files and now it’s down to 20%. But the number of jobs, the number of people, the number of transactions that humans are involved in has actually gone up. It’s not taking the human out of it, it’s making the human more productive in this process. Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I firmly believe this. I think that AI is, it’s one of the greatest productivity boosters or tools that mankind has created. And that’s the way I view it. A lot of people talk about it being like an agent and completely agentic and all that kind of stuff, but if you’ve used it enough, if you’re involved in it, you recognize, okay, we’re not there. we see the pace at which it’s improving, slowing. I mean, how many more Reddit threads can it gobble up? it’s crawled through most of the content. So basically what drives AI is, the training data, algorithmic, development and compute. So those are the things that we can, those are the levers that we can pull to make it better. Long story short is, when we, so when we look at what’s happening right now, by using it as a productivity tool for our professional linguists, we’ve been able, that, we’ve been able to increase their output per day from what’s kind of like an industry standard, let’s call it 2,000 words per day, to 8,000 or more, right? So that’s what’s enabled us to be able to reduce the turnaround time, by about, by about 400x versus traditional. And even within our own world, we’ve improved turnaround, time by 55% over the last two years. So that, that’s a, that’s a big value driver for our customers. They want that turnaround time to reduce and obviously comes around along with that, the cost reduction. Now how do we do that? Well, we kind of looked at it, we thought about it, from an agentic perspective. We’re like, okay, what a human being spend their time doing when they’re actually translating, right? So they’ve got their 2,000 words in a day. What are they, what are they doing? And then, so we go in and we’re working at automating those things that they do. And that’s what’s giving them this huge productivity boost. so, for example, you know, neural machine translation, we use that kind of as a base, and that’s pretty good. that’s a very effective, way to, to, to translate. But then we customize the models using large language models. So for example, we’re in, we’re training the, we’re basically creating custom engines for each one of our customers is the way to think about it. So each one of these setups is custom to them. It’s got their own translation memory, it’s got their own glossary, style guide, terminology, tone of voice, all of these things. Like when, if I’m, if I’m pick, I’m just going to pick a company, Verizon, if I want to sound like Verizon in any one of these countries and make sure I’ve localized that to have the nuances of each One of those things, which is something, by the way, a translator, that local translator would have been done, but we’ve trained the engines to do that work. Right. So it does it highly effectively now. And now we’ve got these really skilled linguists that are, you know, humans in the loop that are managing this process in this machine, who are now looking at this and saying, I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna fix this. I’m fix, I’m tweaking this. But I’m getting highly productive at what I’m doing, I would argue, frankly, taking away a lot of the, kind of like the boring work of, of, translation as well. So we’re training these people into very highly skilled, operators of this technology.

>> Craig Gould: Are your linguists assigned to specific accounts because they, they do know the Disney voice versus the Apple voice versus the Verizon voice, or is that, you know, is that all in. In the cloud and they’re able to just kind of sit back and agnostic of who the customer is, be able to manage those localizations?

>> Bryan Murphy: No, it’s like with anything, you know, there’s familiar, you know, you, you get, you get trained and you learn how a customer likes to operate. So we do try to keep our, linguists with the same customer. Right? So for example, we might start with, obviously language pair, right? And country, so English to Japanese, okay? So obviously we want someone in Japan who is, you know, proficient at English to Japanese language pair. And then think about, okay, what type of, what industry there is this Automotive, Is it Fintech, Is it, biopharma? What is it?

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: And then so we look for that person that’s got that set of experience. And then once we find that person, we assign them to account and they live with that account generally for the duration of the, of the gig because they get to know the customer really, really well and provide great, great service.

>> Craig Gould: It just seems like there are so many moving parts. I think I’ve heard you say the billions of words that you guys have in your database. And I mean, just thinking about one of the harder things about translation. My wife was a French language teacher for 17 years. And even being a French language teacher for 17 years, she would have these gaps in her knowledge of French because there’s conversational French about all the things somebody would do on a daily basis. But when you start talking about product specific, industry specific, technology, you know, there are these.

>> Bryan Murphy: How would you know those things? Right, yeah, right, right. You would, you wouldn’t. And so that’s why translation memory, that’s why glossary, that’s why, all those sorts of linguistic assets as we call them, are really important. And so we put those in and we, and we train the engines. And so another way to think about this too is like, I don’t know, I think I like to think I’m pretty good at marketing or sales or whatever I do, right? And then sometimes, often I’ll go to GPT and I’ll have it analyze something I’ve just done and it gives me a bunch of really good suggestions. I’m like, dang, that was good.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: You know what I mean? it can’t be a gentic, it can’t sit there and do my job for me, okay? But it can really help me be super productive as a CEO and I think better. And so the same thing applies to being a software engineer, a customer service agent, and certainly a translator, right? A linguist. And so that’s the way we built the system is to kind of take, to take away, to do a lot of the grunt work that needs to get done to translate, to build the custom engines, which is really important, right? Because that’s what allows the customer’s brand to come through, and then really be a huge productivity assistant to the linguist and make them better. And that’s, that’s sort of like that, that’s sort of the magic. And that’s how we’re able to deliver once again for these enterprises at scale, we do 7 billion words a year. We’re delivering, you know, custom on brand translation localization, with guaranteed quality for these customers at a fraction of the turnaround time and cost of traditional. It’s a, it’s a massive unlock for, customers that are able to take advantage of this technology.

>> Craig Gould: What would you say to those prospective customers that say, well, I’ll just throw it into ChatGPT and have my web, guy create a German page and a French page. Is that going to work?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah, well, everyone’s doing it. In fact, we did it. I’ll tell you my naughty little story. So I got frustrated because, like every other CEO in the world, in January or whatever before I said, okay, I want every function to report out on how we’re using AI to improve efficiency, right? And our customer service function, customer engagement function was going by too slow and I’m like, I want, like, why can’t our customers interface with us like, like with GPT just. So just integrate GPT just to our text to our customer Service stack and let it answer questions. Right? Total disaster. Okay. and then it turns out that there’s this really great application from Intercom called Fin, which does that. So basically integrates into our customer engagement tech stack with with AI, with a large language model and trained on our data and it’s just like works great. And so to me this is actually the model. Right? So this is natural. I remember back in 2000 when the Internet was commercialized, earlier, right? 96, 97, whatever it was. And we had to build everything, Remember we had to build our own shopping carts, we had to build our own servers, we had to build everything because it didn’t exist. Now, sheesh. With you got aws, you click a button, you got a whole you can spin up around the world, you got Shopify, you don’t need to build any of that kind of stuff. You got Salesforce, Zendesk, et cetera, et cetera. Like you got all these great applications. What’s happening now is because it’s been the first two years of large language models, these tools didn’t exist, these applications didn’t. Like everyone was we got to go fast and we got to build our own stuff. So that’s what people have been doing, thinking they’re using AI right now. What’s happening is there are these great applications, AI applications that are coming out that are very fit for purpose. They do this thing and they do it great. you know, so I think about, you know, thin is a great example, Cursor is a great example.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: Helping software, engineers code and Smartly is an example of that, where, where it’s an AI application that’s purpose built for translation localization. So we’ve got all the integrations, we’ve got all the workflow management, we’ve got all the dynamic this and that, the controls, the safeguards, the hallucination mitigation solutions, all built in, leveraging AI. So if you’re a customer and your boss says, hey, what’s our AI strategy for translation? I would say it’s, it’s smart. Like it’s great. We just save 60%, we cut our cost by 60%, turn our turnaround time by 2x, yada, yada, with this great AI application, boom, away, you’re up and running. So I do think that the future what’s we’re going to this next phase of AI evolution, which is we had this raw like infrastructure like GPT, right. Or whatever.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: That you had to build. Now we’re moving into companies are beginning to build these robust AI applications that take advantage of it. That’s the very natural next step. And then the next step after that will be these, these AI applications would become more fulsome, more complex, handle more things as they get more as they get more robust.

>> Craig Gould: I wasn’t planning to ask a real forward looking question. But you started looking forward. So I’ll ask you this. In terms of the AI landscape, I feel like you and I are probably about the same age and I think back to.

>> Bryan Murphy: You’re 35 too.

>> Craig Gould: It’s exactly. but I think back to 99, 2000, 2001 and the great thinning of the herd in the web space. There were companies that died, but there was a lot of consolidation. It just seems when I look in the AI space in my mind it just seems like there are too many individual players for all of those individual players to survive. Am I wrong in anticipating that? There’s not that it’s going to be a cataclysmic event, but it seems like there’s going to be consolidation at some point. Would you agree?

>> Bryan Murphy: Oh for sure. I mean there’s way too many. I mean, I mean how many you know, large language model companies are there out there? Like thousands. there’ll be like sticks and three that dominate everything. Right. And they’ll be very, and they’ll be geographic too because there’s a lot of interest obviously if there’s politics, get involved, statehood gets involved, all that. So there’ll be more than six. I should, I shouldn’t say that. But there’ll be more. But like globally when you look at market share it’ll, it’ll settle out pretty fast. And then, then there are all there’s incumbents and for you know like purpose, you know, for business function, software for example.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: Like whatever your thing is. And then there’s a whole host of these startups and that’s where it’s going to get really interesting is will the incumbent or with a, will the startup with a disruptor disrupt the incumbent or will the incumbent be fast enough to cover that and adopt? And that’s really where I think all bets are off.

>> Craig Gould: You know, now that we looked forward, I’d love to look back just a little bit. You come to smartling in April of 22. OpenAI makes its big product announcement in November of 22. It’s, it’s kind of a light bulb moment for you and the executive team knowing that this can really be transformative but can you tell me about managing your greater expanse of employees through that transition? It seems like some people could be scared that what does this mean to the way I’ve been doing business? What does this mean to my role? What does this mean moving forward? How, how did you manage that integration and that transition on a, an employee and I guess a cultural level within the organization?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah, that was, that was and is tough. I will say so. One of the things I do I had to first do was gut show, gut check myself, right? So I get. I tend to get pretty excited about things and I’m like, am I chasing a shiny penny here? you know, and I just had to like, kind of really have a conversation with my leadership team. And, I think we reinforced each other’s opinion that no, this is, this is a big deal.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: so once I think, and this happened very fast. I remember, when I saw GPT over the weekend, I think I, you know, created account over a couple of my, you know, Sunday morning cup of coffee or whatever and started playing, around with it. I’m like, immediately I start slacking. My leadership team, I’m like, we got to be paying attention to this. And I think within a week or so we’d kind of put the. We’d kind of hit, the brakes on our product strategy and broke down and had a really serious discussion around how we were going to address this, incorporate this technology, into our. Into our. Into our product. Which, which meant first experimentation in R D, right? Because, like, we’re like, we don’t even know what this thing can do. We know it’s got a lot of potential, but, you know, it’s. It’s certainly not, you know, something we can put in the product yet. So, what that meant was, going out and bulking up our R D function and bringing in some really tremendously talented people. it also meant even though we were and we are, and we are and were and are a very, very highly productive, product and tech, engineering, culture here at smartling. We do 3, 300 production releases a year. In fact. That was part of the problem. I’m like, almost like we are really geared to like, shipping code. and I need, I need a part of this organization that kind of, kind of sit back or, not and like think and break things and play around. So we, we restructured this R D function, brought in some leadership and brought in some really talented people. But I also, I’m like, I had to make it a point that like, hey, we’re a for profit company, we’re a relatively young company, we got to be shipping stuff. So how do we build a framework, with that three headed monster that is R&D product engineering.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: That allowed us to quickly innovate and ship product.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: and I think we came up with a pretty good framework for doing that, which was in R and D world, like an idea could be generated, it could be tested, but it had only a finite amount of time or revs before it was either you know, push it through or kill it. You know what I mean? Like it couldn’t just sit there and the turn, the team couldn’t just sit there and churn on it indefinitely. It was like you have like, you’ve got like 30 days to test, to build it, test it and kill it or ship it. And that’s, that’s, that’s worked out pretty well for us. And part of the other, the really important part of this is really, you know, if you remember going back to this conversation around scale, the, the litmus test for anything was any idea that you have that we’re going to invest, you know, precious time and resources on has to move the needle. It’s either got to significantly reduce cost, turnaround time, or improve quality, which are the three things that matter to our customers. And they had to be able to, to put that as part of their thesis.

>> Craig Gould: In effect, in the thesis had to have less than 100 points, right?

>> Bryan Murphy: Yes, that’s exactly right. Blue paper, those blue books I hated so much.

>> Craig Gould: So I don’t know how you go about managing such a distributed organization because I mean you have offices and employees literally all over the world. Right. Can you talk about the challenges of managing a distributed workforce? Not only managing, but how do you, how do you create culture and how do you maintain culture in such a distributed workforce?

>> Bryan Murphy: That’s a great question. it’s, it’s hard to do. I guess I’ve always, no matter what business I’ve been in, it’s always been distributed. We’ve always had either through acquisitions or growth or whatever. We’ve not everyone’s been in one building. I think that’s, that’s almost impossible, particularly in this day and age. So to me, me it’s about it, to me it starts with the operating plan, right? So it’s really, really important. You know, kind of going back to this idea like companies are only really good at pick, you know, working on three to five things at A time. Right. So we have an operating plan that ladders up into our, you know, essentially our to our strategic plan. Right. So there’s kind of five pillars to this plan and each one of those pillars has you know, two or three, key initiatives, right. And they all have KPIs. So every week, the every people leader in the company, we meet on Wednesdays and we do basically a scrum meeting, to walk through that operating plan and its status. Okay. So there’s like, there is no hiding, there’s no ambiguity around what are the key initiatives in the company and what is the KPI. So and I always tell people when they’re onboarding and is I onboard every new person in the company, I have a meeting with them, either one people or kind of a class of people. And I always say one of the most important things is if you don’t know your KPI, you are, your job is after this call to slack your manager and find out what it is. And I hope you do know it because that’s like the key. So in my mind is if we’re operating this very distributed organization, right? If everyone knows what the operating plan is, knows what their role in it and knows what their KPI isn’t it. It’s hard to kind of drift, right. I always say like someone could have like a hundred things to do in a day, but they know every Wednesday they’re going to get called out on two or three of those. So people, they tend to focus on those things. And that’s, that seems to be how that works.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah, I mean it just seems like you, you really have to have a focus on goal congruency and I guess if in that team meeting with those 20 heads, if you’ve identified the right KPI for those people, you know, there should be a waterfall of goals, you know, below that, that roll up to those things. So it’s. Knowing what those key deliverables are at the highest level is probably a pretty big part of your job, right? Making sure that you’re picking out the right goals.

>> Bryan Murphy: Yeah, I, I think that is. The job is, as a CEO is to set the strategic plan alongside with your leadership team and your board.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Bryan Murphy: Okay. What’s our five year plan and how are we going to get there? What are the, what are those three to five key initiatives that we’re going to invest all our time, capital and energy into? and then making sure those things are executed well, and I’m playing and that, that to Me and making sure that’s communicated. Like, so there’s. There’s no gaps. Like, you can’t be like, oh, I didn’t know that was what I think, or I was working on this thing over there. I almost never hear that. Never. I used to hear it all the time. I almost never hear that in our organization. I probably get the latter, which is, oh, my God, I can’t. I’m, like, starting to stress because Wednesday’s coming up. It’s not, and it’s not meant to be stressful. It’s like, really, this is this, this. It’s like focusing this incredible energy and talent of this organization on the things that matter to me. That’s the, that’s the big part of the job of being a CEO. And then sometimes, by the way, like we talked about earlier, like two years ago or whatever, it was like, all of a sudden this thing changes. Like, all of a sudden, like, like, you know, like, wait, time out. This. The world just changed and we need to be able to react accordingly. And I think, you know, as a small company. Smaller company. Yeah, small company CEO. like, that’s easy for me. I know it. When you’re a big enterprise, it’s way.

>> Craig Gould: Way, way, way harder if you’re somebody who’s trying to navigate their career. And, you know, short of starting a business with, with your cousin or like, stepping out on your own, like, if you found yourself in the middle of a big corporate structure and you want to stand out because you’re trying to get to the C suite, what advice can you give someone in terms of how to distinguish themselves, how to differentiate themselves from all those other names, and faces that are out there so that they’re able to rise above the huddled masses?

>> Bryan Murphy: yeah, there’s a couple pieces of advice. and the first piece, of advice I got from a, ah, gentleman named George Conrad, who’s been a mentor for me. And if you know the name, he was president, of IBM, CEO of Akamai, on, many, many boards. But he’s like, kind of like he’s been my North Star as a mentor for a long time. But I asked him when I graduated from college, hey, George, I’m graduating. I’m going to get a job. What advice do you have? Me, I was expecting like, this whole laundry list of things. And he just, he said, listen, number one, hit your numbers. Number two, raise your hand and like, and in that order. I think I added the. In that order later. But, like, that’s basically it. Like, when I was 22, and I still tell people that today. I think that’s, like, the simplest piece of advice. Like, you have to do your job, right? You have to hit your numbers. And then once you hit your numbers, then you raise your hand like you say, hey, I see an opportunity for the business over here. if we do X, Y, and Z, I’m willing to do that on top of my own, my regular job and hitting my numbers over here.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Bryan Murphy: To create growth, for example. And I think that that’s the thing that gets attention, right? because it’s not enough to, like, to be an A player, right? To hit your numbers. We love that. That’s great. Hey, man, you’re doing your job. We love you.

>> Speaker C: You, right?

>> Bryan Murphy: But you got to be, you got to be able to show initiative, leadership, and the ability to execute, at a different level. That’s the thing that will get you noticed, and that will get you the promotion.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Bryan I think I’ve taken up more than enough of your time today. It’s been a great conversation. I really appreciate you opening up, talking to us about smartling and your journey and your wisdom. I mean, I really appreciate you being my guest.

>> Bryan Murphy: Craig, it was great. I really enjoyed talking with you.

>> Craig Gould: Absolutely.