Building Marketo and the Art of Product Design - Glen Lipka

Justin Norris: 00:00:14

Welcome to RevOps FM, everyone.

Justin Norris: 00:00:16

You know, Martech has been a huge part of my career, especially the Marketo

Justin Norris: 00:00:20

platform, and when you've been using a piece of software for more than a

Justin Norris: 00:00:23

decade, you know it inside and out.

Justin Norris: 00:00:25

It's like an old friend.

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There's the stuff you like, the stuff you hate, the stuff that's irritating,

Justin Norris: 00:00:30

but you tolerate it, that sort of thing.

Justin Norris: 00:00:33

And I have a fascination for how these products actually get made.

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You know, like what were the decisions, what were the trade offs along the way?

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How do these great products get designed?

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How do they catch on?

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And then also what makes them stagnant?

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What makes them lose energy?

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And so to chat about this, we have with us today, a man who was instrumental

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in designing Marketo in the early days.

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He was literally the first employee.

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At Marketo building many of its first and still most beloved features.

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And since then, he's held product leadership roles at companies like

Justin Norris: 00:01:01

Engagio treasure data, and most recently CrowdStrike where he is a VP

Justin Norris: 00:01:06

of product design today, Glenn Lipka.

Justin Norris: 00:01:09

I am so glad to have you on the show.

Glen Lipka: 00:01:11

Thanks for having me Justin.

Glen Lipka: 00:01:13

It's a pleasure

Glen Lipka: 00:01:13

to be here.

Justin Norris: 00:01:14

I would love just to start off with a little bit of the history

Justin Norris: 00:01:18

about how you got started at Marketo.

Glen Lipka: 00:01:20

I had been working at Intuit, in 2006 and, a friend of mine,

Glen Lipka: 00:01:25

named Lisa Sheehan, who's a recruiter, was putting together the founding team

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for Marketo, and she thought that.

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I would hit it off with them, but she said they didn't actually have a role for me.

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they were just hiring engineers, but she said, go meet with them anyway.

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and so I met, John Miller and Phil Fernandez and David Mirandi.

Glen Lipka: 00:01:45

They were still unpacking boxes from, purchases they made from their series.

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Hey, you know, the, desks and the chairs, and they were just putting them together

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in a San Mateo, super tiny office.

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and.

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We hit it off and I think Phil may have liked the fact that I was a network

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administrator, and I could run the network, and install the exchange server

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and do operational IT things in addition to product management and design.

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so I think he thought, it was a

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bargain.

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so they ended up hiring me and then right after me was, Crash Tongue, which

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is one of the best engineers I've ever worked with, Paul Abrams, who was my

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partner in the entire UI development, Wei Liu and several other people who

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became the founding, engineering team.

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It was mostly like me and.

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10 engineers in those that first year or two, along with Kelly Abner, who

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is the first marketer, using Marketo and he was working with John Miller.

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John had already been blogging at that point.

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but Kelly was my proto marketer that if I could automate what he was doing.

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that would be a successful

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product.

Justin Norris: 00:02:55

So that kind of ties into the next question I was going to

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ask, which is like the process that you followed and you have shared on your

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blog, which I'll link to in the show notes, some of the like really early.

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versions of Marketo when it was like an AdWords management tool and maybe

Justin Norris: 00:03:11

just walk us through like the seed idea and then maybe the process of

Justin Norris: 00:03:14

getting to what we might recognize today is the Marketo platform.

Glen Lipka: 00:03:18

With the first six months we built what is best described as

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a replacement for Google AdWords.

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Like you would use this interface instead of the Google AdWords interface because

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Google AdWords was too complicated.

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And I tried to tell David Mirandi and Phil Fernandez, that it wasn't going to work,

Glen Lipka: 00:03:36

but it doesn't matter how hard it was.

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And the reason is if you looked at a marketer's resume at the time, it said

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things like, I know how to order t shirts.

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I know how to make brochures.

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I could, make our website and I know how to use Google AdWords.

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It was one of the few hard skills that somebody had, and you can't just take

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that away and say, Instead of Google AdWords, I'll just be good at Marketo

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AdWords, which that didn't make any sense, but they wanted to build it

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and they felt really strong about it.

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And one of the pieces that was needed was this landing page editor.

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and at the time all landing page editors worked the same way.

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It was, you had a template, you clicked on a section of the template and it

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popped up a tiny MCE rich text editor.

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And I said, why does it have to work like that?

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Maybe it could be more like PowerPoint.

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I just drag and drop stuff.

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everyone knows how to use PowerPoint.

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It's super easy.

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You just drag things around and there's nothing to think about.

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And because I was talking to people about their landing pages and it

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wasn't that much on them, it wasn't like a long, super scrolling page,

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but then the team, they were just like, yeah, but how does that work?

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That's not how HTML works.

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And I was like, actually, it is how HTML works.

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Let me explain absolute positioning and CSS.

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And man, the engineers, they hated CSS.

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So I had to be the CSS person for the first year and, you know,

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explain exactly how That would work.

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so we launched that product and the customer said, yeah, we're not doing this

Glen Lipka: 00:05:12

Google AdWords thing, but that landing page editor that looks really cool.

Glen Lipka: 00:05:16

I'm willing to pay for that, but I don't want the.

Glen Lipka: 00:05:20

Google AdWords part.

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So we ended up erasing all the code that we had written for the Google AdWords

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thing, it had word buckets and all sorts of synonyms and antonyms and crazy

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stuff, and we just erased all of it.

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And what was interesting for years, it had search in the URL.

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And it was only like a vestige of that old code that we had erased.

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We just threw all of that away and it was just gone.

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And then because I had gained some credibility with the landing page

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editor, they gave me a little bit more room to say what we're doing next.

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And the use case in essence was pretty simple.

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we had a focus group.

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And there was, some marketers in the room and they were talking about these

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landing pages and about, Salesforce and Salesforce had an auto responder

Glen Lipka: 00:06:11

for email and they said, all I want is when they fill out that form on the

Glen Lipka: 00:06:16

landing page is to send them an email.

Glen Lipka: 00:06:19

Wait a week, send them another email, right?

Glen Lipka: 00:06:23

Why is that so hard?

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And she was doing this thing with her hand, send an email,

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wait a week, send another email.

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And it made me think of Minority Report with Tom Cruise, where he had that

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computer interface where he's using his hands and swiping things around.

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And I said, Wouldn't it be cool if it was like that, like a hologram interface?

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And the engineers were like, no, that's physically impossible.

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And I was like, I have a dream, man.

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And so I.

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created a trick of psychology of it would feel like you're, rolling up your

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sleeves, putting your hand into the screen and grabbing something and moving it.

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And just like the way that person said, send an email,

Glen Lipka: 00:07:11

wait a week, send another email.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:13

And I said, that's what Mercado is going to feel like.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:16

It's going to feel like you're a kinetic reaching into the computer And making

Glen Lipka: 00:07:23

things move and that use case, which is really a very simple use case.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:29

You fill out the form, send an email, wait a week, send an email.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:33

That was the use case that made smart campaigns.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:37

That was the use case that made Marketo.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:40

but once you sit and think what does it mean to send an email, wait a week,

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send an email from a landing page?

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How do you do that?

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And I said, well, first we need the landing page editor.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:51

And I felt pretty good about that.

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we had something.

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Then I said, well, we need a form editor.

Glen Lipka: 00:07:56

So I had to make a form editor to put on top of the landing page.

Glen Lipka: 00:08:01

Then it was like, well, it's going to have to send an email.

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So we need an email editor.

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And I actually was spending an enormous amount of time figuring out

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what HTML would even work for me.

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In email clients, which at the time was just a completely wild west.

Glen Lipka: 00:08:17

today you would just have your templates, but, maybe it was constant contact and,

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it was me and those guys were figuring out like what stuff would work and what

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wouldn't work across different, clients.

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It was very much like, what can you do in JavaScript with different

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browsers, except it was email.

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and different email clients.

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And so, I needed that email editor and then I needed something to just glue

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it together to say, okay, well, I'm gonna wait till they fill out the form.

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I'm then I need some way of describing the text now, everyone in competitive.

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Circle said, Oh, you do that with a Vizio like diagram.

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And I asked Kelly Abner, I was like, do you like Vizio?

Glen Lipka: 00:09:02

And he was like, Oh no, I hate it.

Glen Lipka: 00:09:03

This thing gets incredibly complicated and it's really difficult to manage.

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And God forbid you want to edit it later.

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You're going to break everything but it's, what are you going to do?

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It's the only thing that's there.

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I was like, well, I don't know, come up with another way.

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And so I just started.

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making designs of how it could be.

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And I said, here's a, series of steps.

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And one of the ways Phil Fernandez put it is the way I was designing it was

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as if it was a programming language and that the Visio world was using

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procedural language terminology, and he called it a CISC architecture C I C S

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and it was like complex instructions, whereas what I was building was

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more object oriented programming and it was RISC architecture, random.

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So you can think of like an Intel chip as being a CISC chip, whereas like, a

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little mini chip that only does Wi Fi, like from ARM or somebody, that's a RISC.

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So the RISC architecture and the CISC architecture became our mental

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model of what it is that we were doing, and that very quickly what

Glen Lipka: 00:10:10

a smart campaign was started coming together as this, kinetic feel from

Glen Lipka: 00:10:16

Minority Report, Minority Report.

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And just this simple use case of send an email, wait a week, send another email.

Glen Lipka: 00:10:23

there were a few different influential programs.

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IBM had one called Rational Rose.

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and it kind of influenced the way the smart list works.

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iTunes, influenced the way, I thought about like a dynamic list versus a

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static list because iTunes had, you know, show me all of the songs that are

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jazz, or show me just these 10 songs.

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So I was taking some cues from iTunes.

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From these IBM tools I'd used a decade before.

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but a lot of it was just like, it just made sense to me.

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structurally I've always designed a customizable platform style user

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interfaces, as opposed to sitemap page by page by page structure.

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and it pretty quickly.

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made sense.

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Although I would say that Kelly Abner really didn't want to use it at first.

Glen Lipka: 00:11:16

It was incredibly buggy anyone who's used the first year of

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Marketo knows how buggy that system was barely hung on for dear life.

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it would work about as often as it wouldn't work.

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but the whole concept of you could do this, that it was your creativity

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that was creating what was happening.

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Was so powerful that it didn't matter whether it worked or not worked.

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The promise was that you could do it yourself.

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A lot of, marketers, they had a person in marketing who is the web developer.

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this person spoke Klingon.

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This person was, move.

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I'll just do it.

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Don't talk to me about the website.

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they hated this person.

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They hated the web developer because they did not have that skill.

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They didn't have the capability of doing these technical things.

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And in their minds, it was like, I just want to fix a comma on the webpage.

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Why is this so hard?

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Or why is it so hard to send an email?

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And all of a sudden there was this tool that said, no, you, could

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be in charge, you could do this.

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I think a lot of products don't understand how to connect with people

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and make them the hero of the story.

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it's not like people just want a button where it all just works.

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they want to do it.

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They want to be a part of the solution.

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And Marquette's entire ethos was, that we're putting you in the driver's seat.

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You are a creative, technical person, and that you're not just ordering t shirts.

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You're not just, writing copy, but you can actually make experiences.

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was a really big deal.

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And it started doing well relatively

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quickly.

Justin Norris: 00:13:02

could tell you as a user, picking up Marketo signed

Justin Norris: 00:13:05

my first contract just at the end of 2011 starting using it.

Justin Norris: 00:13:09

went through that experience that you described.

Justin Norris: 00:13:11

Like in the beginning it's, complicated and it's weird, but I used to tell

Justin Norris: 00:13:14

people there's like a Zen moment that you have where all of a sudden like

Justin Norris: 00:13:17

everything falls into place and you're like, Oh, like the world opens up.

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Like I can do anything now, just by dragging these things.

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And it was an incredibly empowering experience as a non technical marketer

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who was sort of technically inclined.

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Just like you said, it gave you those capabilities.

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and that was enormously empowering.

Justin Norris: 00:13:36

I want to just double click cause I'm really fascinated by the, two

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visual paradigms that you mentioned.

Justin Norris: 00:13:40

I think of it as the bowl of spaghetti model.

Justin Norris: 00:13:43

You called it probably more charitably, the Vizio style, like flow chart diagram

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model, and then the more linear model.

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And it feels like people split into camps.

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And today, like even today, we still see, like there was Marketo, but

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sort of Zapier's followed a similar linear format and Mercado does.

Justin Norris: 00:13:58

Over on the.

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Vizio side, you know, you have Eloqua and Salesforce flow and Trey.

Justin Norris: 00:14:03

do you still feel the same?

Justin Norris: 00:14:06

like if you had to do it all over again, you would pick this model,

Justin Norris: 00:14:09

or do you see some strengths and weaknesses between the two paradigms?

Glen Lipka: 00:14:12

Well, the reason to pick it in the beginning has everything

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to do with differentiation.

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It was, Elko was a big player.

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they were the dominant 600 pound gorilla and, responses was also

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a very strong player at the time.

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And when you can't just come in and say, Hey, you know, that other software you

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use, well, we do about 10 percent of it.

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well, what are they going to do?

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They're going to say no.

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So you need something.

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And Bill Bench had said something very wise, which is, I need to be able to

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go to someone and say, if you don't have X and you don't have shit, right?

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I need to tell them that and I'll make them believe it, but

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it has to be plausible of like you have to have this thing.

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And so what I found is some people were used to the Vizio

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charts and that was fine, but it wasn't like the linear was worse.

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I thought it was better for management and maybe a little worse for giving a demo.

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But it wasn't like night and day.

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It was, you could get your job done either way.

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So the perfect design differentiation is something that actually doesn't matter.

Glen Lipka: 00:15:25

That's perfect.

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Cause you don't want something that's like objectively worse.

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But, I'll give you an example.

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the Tesla who, if it wasn't for Elon Musk, I would love my Tesla a lot more,

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but when I first got it, there was nothing in front of my steering wheel.

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It was all on the screen.

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Now, was that better or worse?

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I would say, you get used to it, you get used to it, but it was different.

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And so when I'm thinking about Marketo differentiation, I

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needed to create a religious war.

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I needed people to say, Oh, if you're not into the flows and you're not doing

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shit, you're like, if you're not, if you're a Vizio person, you're an idiot.

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and even though I knew they were like roughly equivalent, it doesn't matter.

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You need to create a warrant.

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This is a lesson for every single tech marketer out there.

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Differentiation will get you half the market.

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We were nobody.

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We were nobody.

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And Elko was huge, a huge company.

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And what business did we have taking half the market share away from them?

Glen Lipka: 00:16:33

We didn't.

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They had way more functionality.

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They called us play school.

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I remember it was very hurtful, right?

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And they would call us play school.

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And I just be like, but if we create a war and you're either on our side or not,

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and that led us to like a very strong community, Eloqua didn't have a strong

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community and that we said, you're not just buying software, you're buying

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into this group of like minded people.

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When you create a religious war, people want to be on your team, right?

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It's one team or the other.

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And then that's loyalty.

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And we did a lot of things in the beginning to get that loyalty.

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I remember one customer, we must've done 50, 000 worth of, consulting

Glen Lipka: 00:17:18

because they had multiple Salesforce instances and we just merged them for

Glen Lipka: 00:17:22

just because they were like, we can't buy your software until this gets done.

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And it'll take a year and a half.

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And we're just like, I think we can just do it.

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And they said, well, how much do you want?

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What do you want in return?

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I said, all I want is undying loyalty.

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And they put, I know, I remember they put me on mute.

Glen Lipka: 00:17:41

And I could tell that they were laughing at us, but then they

Glen Lipka: 00:17:44

come back and they were like, all right, glad we'll, give you that.

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And let me tell you that they gave us references.

Glen Lipka: 00:17:49

They took videos, they wrote guest blog posts, they did

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everything we asked them to do.

Glen Lipka: 00:17:54

And in the beginning that mattered a lot.

Glen Lipka: 00:17:58

And so what our approach was, was very differentiated.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:02

but the truth is it's not better or worse.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:04

Now, in hindsight, what I did with Playmaker with Engagio, I think

Glen Lipka: 00:18:09

had advantages, like involve a customization layer, like Marketo

Glen Lipka: 00:18:14

is a very set it and forget it.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:16

Sort of system.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:17

the marketer is completely in charge, but the SDRs could

Glen Lipka: 00:18:20

have been part of that process.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:22

It could have been like, here's a queue.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:24

I take a ticket off of the top.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:26

I customize it a little bit and then send it on its way.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:29

And, I would have done more of that.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:31

Plus, I think that I would have made more abstraction of the flows so that

Glen Lipka: 00:18:37

you can have sub flows the way that in Figma you have components that are

Glen Lipka: 00:18:41

reusable blocks and that yeah, you could do some reasonable things like

Glen Lipka: 00:18:47

call campaign, but you couldn't see it.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:50

it was very difficult to see that high level.

Glen Lipka: 00:18:53

So I probably would have added in more of that that abstraction layer.

Justin Norris: 00:18:57

It's funny that like 10 years later, Marquetto

Justin Norris: 00:18:59

did roll out some kind of flow charty way of visualizing things.

Justin Norris: 00:19:05

I've never really used it or liked it because it is very high level and very

Justin Norris: 00:19:09

basic so clearly they felt that out in the market there was someone that wanted

Justin Norris: 00:19:13

this and maybe wasn't buying Marketo because of it so they threw it in to

Justin Norris: 00:19:16

tick a box but I just find it ironic that after all that time they circled

Justin Norris: 00:19:20

around and slipped that in there.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:22

there was a UI, I used to call it fluid dynamics.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:25

It was basically the, process, forgetting the name that they had for it.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:30

but it was a Vizio diagram it wasn't about a flow of like, send an email, wait

Glen Lipka: 00:19:34

a week, send an email, it was more like,

Glen Lipka: 00:19:37

first they're a lead, then they

Justin Norris: 00:19:38

The revenue cycle

Justin Norris: 00:19:39

modeler,

Glen Lipka: 00:19:41

Yes, the Revenue Cycle Modeler, that did make

Glen Lipka: 00:19:43

sense to be a Visio diagram.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:45

that totally made sense.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:46

Not everything should be a flow, it's use the right tool.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:50

So the Revenue Cycle Modeler was a Visio diagram on purpose,

Glen Lipka: 00:19:56

and it worked well in that case.

Glen Lipka: 00:19:58

And that the program, flows with the green strip, that made

Glen Lipka: 00:20:02

sense also to be a, diagram.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:05

but doing it for just send an email, wait a week, send an email.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:10

I think after I had left in 2015, they lost their way a little bit.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:17

They sold to private equity.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:18

I should have stayed the one extra year.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:20

That would have been very lucrative for me.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:22

I kind of missed out on that one.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:24

And once they got taken private, it was more just like shore up the functionality,

Glen Lipka: 00:20:30

get it prepared to sell to Adobe.

Glen Lipka: 00:20:32

And then once you're in Adobe, it's, more of a maintenance mode.

Justin Norris: 00:20:37

really want to go down that road, but I'm just curious because

Justin Norris: 00:20:39

you mentioned Eloqua, I've had a chat on this show as well with Mark Oregon,

Justin Norris: 00:20:43

who's the founding CEO of Eloqua, and it's funny hearing the story.

Justin Norris: 00:20:47

A lot of similarities where they started out with a completely different use

Justin Norris: 00:20:50

case in mind and then stumbled into this thing from a different direction.

Justin Norris: 00:20:55

I'm curious from your point of view, like this category of marketing

Justin Norris: 00:20:58

automation didn't exist, really.

Justin Norris: 00:21:00

It wasn't a thing.

Justin Norris: 00:21:01

what was the process like of Emerging into like, oh yeah, there's this

Justin Norris: 00:21:04

thing where we like score leads and send them emails to nurture them.

Justin Norris: 00:21:07

And like, having that concept emerge,

Glen Lipka: 00:21:09

Again, it, did start off very simply of I just want to send an email,

Glen Lipka: 00:21:13

wait a week and send another email.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:15

And then all of a sudden it's like, well, what else do people want to do?

Glen Lipka: 00:21:18

And that just became more and more, functions more and more

Glen Lipka: 00:21:21

things that you could do, but it was always the same language.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:25

And the language is when something happens, I want

Glen Lipka: 00:21:28

to do some sort of response.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:31

And it was designed like a programming language.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:34

I remember in the beginning, I remember when Eloqua was, I think it was there,

Glen Lipka: 00:21:38

they were a content management system.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:40

and I looked at their UI and I just thought, my goodness, it's so complicated

Glen Lipka: 00:21:45

and it was very expensive to implement.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:47

And then when we started going, our tagline was, I think I

Glen Lipka: 00:21:53

had come up with the tagline, which easy, powerful, complete.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:57

but it was our whole ethos was this is easier.

Glen Lipka: 00:21:59

It's simpler.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:00

It's how Salesforce beat Siebel.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:02

they just made it easier.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:03

They made it easier to self service.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:05

And I remember them at the time tweeting something like celebrating

Glen Lipka: 00:22:12

a victory over Marchetto.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:15

And I was just, it blew my mind.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:16

Cause I'm just like, we're nobody.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:18

Why are they even saying her name?

Glen Lipka: 00:22:20

that's just telling people, Oh, there's a competitor that they're focused on.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:25

And I.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:26

Literally responded immediately like saying, good one, you know, the last

Glen Lipka: 00:22:31

10, you lost, but this one nice job and they erased their posts and I,

Glen Lipka: 00:22:35

so I had screenshot it and I sent it back to them saying, I think you lost

Glen Lipka: 00:22:39

this, it was just, we were the cool kids and they were the old grandpa.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:45

Uh, and then they ended up paying IDEO to design.

Glen Lipka: 00:22:52

a Marketo killer and I thought I was so flattered and so, excited that it

Glen Lipka: 00:22:57

was like me versus IDEO because they're famous design firm and what they ended

Glen Lipka: 00:23:01

up doing is taking exactly what they have and just putting a nice, paint

Glen Lipka: 00:23:06

job on it, making it look a little bit nicer, but I was just like, yeah,

Glen Lipka: 00:23:11

there's no way they're going to fix that.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:13

and I felt like it was an unfair battle, they just did not have

Glen Lipka: 00:23:16

the resources or understanding.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:19

And I knew that they were going to end up selling pennies on the dollar,

Glen Lipka: 00:23:22

which is what they did to, Oracle.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:25

and then they went into their own maintenance mode.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:27

it's like when you have that energy.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:30

That this is something cool and different and, better.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:33

Everyone gets really excited about it.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:36

I think that I underestimated the lightning in a bottle effect.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:41

at the time, the people, there were so many great people there who were

Glen Lipka: 00:23:45

like Maria Pergolino was inventing inbound marketing before my eyes.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:50

Bill Bench was Inventing SAS sales.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:53

there were so many things that I was just mesmerized by how they were happening.

Glen Lipka: 00:23:59

And I was just very lucky to be right in the middle of it, but like revenue

Glen Lipka: 00:24:05

operations or, marketing operations, it's sort of like, we didn't even think about

Glen Lipka: 00:24:11

it until it was already real for years.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:16

It was just more like, there's Emily Salas and she's trying to

Glen Lipka: 00:24:19

solve this problem and how do we.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:21

Help her solve this problem.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:22

And generally, I remember, they were very early, the first couple of customers,

Glen Lipka: 00:24:28

like I trained our first 50 customers personally, and they would have just

Glen Lipka: 00:24:32

these weird little problems and we've been sitting at a whiteboard saying,

Glen Lipka: 00:24:35

how are we going to solve that for them?

Glen Lipka: 00:24:38

I remember also we invented anonymous leads and I said to Jenna

Glen Lipka: 00:24:44

Raleigh, you got to check this out.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:45

Anonymous leads are great.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:46

And she's like, Glenn, I know you're very excited about your

Glen Lipka: 00:24:50

anonymous leads, but I'm very busy.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:52

You're not the center of my universe.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:54

I have a job to do.

Glen Lipka: 00:24:55

And I was like, huh?

Glen Lipka: 00:24:57

And then like six months later, she comes back and like, Hey,

Glen Lipka: 00:25:00

these anonymous leads are great.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:01

And I was like, I've been trying to tell you that.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:03

And it's a strong lesson that just because you build some cool thing and

Glen Lipka: 00:25:08

just because you have an early adopter customer doesn't mean that they're

Glen Lipka: 00:25:11

ready for it and doesn't mean that they want to hear from you all the time.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:15

This is probably the biggest lesson from Marketo is that More features

Glen Lipka: 00:25:21

is not why you're gonna win.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:23

More features is not why you're going to be successful as a tech startup.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:27

It's never about the number of features.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:29

It's always how does it work?

Glen Lipka: 00:25:31

Who are you?

Glen Lipka: 00:25:33

are you?

Glen Lipka: 00:25:33

creating differentiation?

Glen Lipka: 00:25:35

Are you creating a cultural, mainstay for someone to latch onto?

Glen Lipka: 00:25:41

That's what matters.

Glen Lipka: 00:25:42

The number of features, I mean, you need like a minimum, you need to be able to

Glen Lipka: 00:25:46

do something, but we had four, I would say we pounced on Eloqua and at the point

Glen Lipka: 00:25:55

where they had given up, we still only had half the functionality they had.

Justin Norris: 00:25:59

I want to talk about this dynamic that you've described.

Justin Norris: 00:26:03

both Marquette and Ellipa going through the lifecycle of a product where it's

Justin Norris: 00:26:07

got like innovation, energy expansion, and then like maintenance mode.

Justin Norris: 00:26:15

and you've listed in one of your blog posts, a lot of Marketo features

Justin Norris: 00:26:18

that went out sort of half baked, I think, as you described it.

Justin Norris: 00:26:21

And I've observed this, anyone watching could see every year at summit, there

Justin Norris: 00:26:24

was like SEO, social, ABM, like it was really clear, what's the trend?

Justin Norris: 00:26:30

What's the buzzword this year?

Justin Norris: 00:26:31

We've got to do something for that.

Justin Norris: 00:26:32

And then it was like a big splash and then half quarter baked, never came back to it.

Justin Norris: 00:26:37

So there was this, and I'm not saying this to like dump on Marketo

Justin Norris: 00:26:41

or criticize anyone, but it's a dynamic that you can observe.

Justin Norris: 00:26:44

In the market and it makes products suck.

Justin Norris: 00:26:47

and that hurts me as like someone who, a big part of my career

Justin Norris: 00:26:50

is working with these products.

Justin Norris: 00:26:52

And I wonder for your thoughts about how does a company avoid this?

Justin Norris: 00:26:55

And I asked this to founders that I speak to too, like, how are you going

Justin Norris: 00:26:57

to avoid making your products suck?

Justin Norris: 00:26:59

Cause you can see it coming.

Justin Norris: 00:27:00

Like, how does somebody avoid that, rock in the water?

Glen Lipka: 00:27:03

To me, I can peg it to 2012, we went public, and from that day

Glen Lipka: 00:27:08

forward, everything went out differently.

Glen Lipka: 00:27:13

so like, in the beginning, there's a thing called PCAMP in Silicon Valley,

Glen Lipka: 00:27:18

which is for product managers and they were talking about releases and

Glen Lipka: 00:27:23

I was like, we release every two weeks and they literally almost fell out of

Glen Lipka: 00:27:27

their chairs of like, are you crazy?

Glen Lipka: 00:27:29

How is that possible?

Glen Lipka: 00:27:31

And it's because we were young and didn't know any better

Glen Lipka: 00:27:34

and we were just doing things.

Glen Lipka: 00:27:36

And if you go back in the release notes, and I think that they're still

Glen Lipka: 00:27:40

there, the first year of release notes is me writing personally.

Glen Lipka: 00:27:45

Like, so if you look at the way the release notes are written,

Glen Lipka: 00:27:49

it's not these big stories.

Glen Lipka: 00:27:51

It's just, okay, now I, now we have this, now we have this, now we have

Glen Lipka: 00:27:55

this, and it's fleshing it out.

Glen Lipka: 00:27:57

It's adding to the story.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:00

And then there comes a point where they start being very long

Glen Lipka: 00:28:03

and much more like flourishing.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:06

And that's the point of where professionals got involved.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:10

And at that point, there was these, there was no such thing as a small improvement.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:14

It was always a huge thing.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:17

And it was.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:19

Really unfortunate.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:21

and I think that the point of where it was very painful was programs.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:26

we had reached a point where it's like, people are trying to do

Glen Lipka: 00:28:30

things that are really complicated.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:31

And this revenue cycle, analytics is not working, People did not like it at all.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:39

and I had actually left the company for a brief period, right.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:43

In the middle of it.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:44

And when I came back, they were like, you got to fix our analytics thing.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:47

Everyone is upset.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:49

And when I looked at it, I was like, okay, I see the problem.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:51

The problem is, is that John Miller is a physics major, from Harvard and

Glen Lipka: 00:28:56

Stanford, and he's incredibly smart.

Glen Lipka: 00:28:58

And he's like, everyone should be thinking about the percentage that your, conversion

Glen Lipka: 00:29:03

from lead to opportunity is dropping at a precipitous rate compared to, you know,

Glen Lipka: 00:29:09

the last year is over, blah, blah, blah.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:11

And I was like, that's not what people want.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:13

They want to know how many webinars did I have?

Glen Lipka: 00:29:15

I had six, that was it.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:18

They just wanted to know how many programs did I run?

Glen Lipka: 00:29:20

How many things did I achieve?

Glen Lipka: 00:29:22

They weren't getting measured on like these.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:26

I described it as buckets of M& Ms where the holes would be changing sizes

Glen Lipka: 00:29:32

at different rates and the M& Ms of different colors would be coming out of

Glen Lipka: 00:29:36

the buckets, going into different buckets.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:38

It's like fluid dynamics.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:40

And I was like, it's so complicated.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:42

It's not what people want.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:44

They just want to say the basic thing.

Glen Lipka: 00:29:48

how many mail blasts did I do?

Glen Lipka: 00:29:50

How many opportunities did we influence?

Glen Lipka: 00:29:53

And that this was around the same time that marketers started having

Glen Lipka: 00:29:59

this schism, the marketers who were overreaching, trying to say that

Glen Lipka: 00:30:02

they created the revenue and the other marketers who were like, let's

Glen Lipka: 00:30:07

just claim that we did the webinar.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:09

And that.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:10

I think that there was a huge overreach in that first group and it

Glen Lipka: 00:30:14

created a lot of problems with sales.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:17

So we made program analytics, which I have two patents.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:24

Both of them are relating to this period.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:26

I literally did math for all year of just figuring out like

Glen Lipka: 00:30:30

how things were going to work.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:31

How do we, you know, things like first touch, attribution and last touch

Glen Lipka: 00:30:36

attribution and multi touch attribution.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:38

I didn't intern.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:39

Name Karina Boo from, Cal who is helping me with all of these charts and graphs

Glen Lipka: 00:30:45

of like an S curves of exactly how we were going to attribute things.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:49

she's a, founder in her own right right now of a company called Warmly.

Glen Lipka: 00:30:53

And, when we made programs, I said, okay, people aren't going to just want

Glen Lipka: 00:30:58

to do this just for the analytics.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:00

We need to give them an extra reason to do this.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:03

And I said, the good, the easy reason is.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:08

You don't have to go to the design studio.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:10

You don't have to go to these other areas.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:11

You can just make your program with all the stuff in it right there.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:16

And, we call those local assets.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:18

And I said, the local assets is the reason to make it easier for people

Glen Lipka: 00:31:22

to use the software and that the benefit they'll get is the program

Glen Lipka: 00:31:26

analytics, the attribution that you can't just go into the attribution.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:30

You have to give them a little bit of candy first, and then

Glen Lipka: 00:31:34

they'll take the attribution.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:36

And that was our biggest feature ever.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:40

That's a huge change from the way it worked beforehand.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:44

and the design of all of it with the different program types and, success

Glen Lipka: 00:31:48

and how does it sync to Salesforce?

Glen Lipka: 00:31:50

campaigns.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:51

It was all very intricate and I really love the design that

Glen Lipka: 00:31:55

we put together for that.

Glen Lipka: 00:31:58

And then I got in this argument with Cheryl Chavez, who is the.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:01

product management director, where she's like, we have to get it out the door.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:05

And I said, I don't think people will remember what month we delivered this

Glen Lipka: 00:32:09

thing, but they will remember how it made them feel when they first used it.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:14

And if it doesn't have these local assets.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:17

It will feel broken.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:20

And she insisted we launched it and everyone was upset.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:24

Everyone was super upset because they were just like, you made this big change,

Glen Lipka: 00:32:28

but why it's like, there's no point.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:30

And it was only two months later that we released the full version.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:36

And then everyone was like, Oh, this is great.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:38

we can use this.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:38

And then programs became a much more successful.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:42

concept, but that, was a very upsetting moment because I knew it was wrong.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:47

I knew it was going to cause us grief.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:50

And for what, for a couple of months, nobody remembers what

Glen Lipka: 00:32:53

month the feature came out.

Glen Lipka: 00:32:55

And I think that it was around that time that we were getting ready to go public.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:00

after we went public, it was always another story.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:03

We needed to tell an acquisition.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:05

Social was.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:07

Like a thing for like a few months.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:09

And then I'm like, nobody's going to use this.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:12

Nobody's going to care about this after it stops being the cool

Glen Lipka: 00:33:16

thing, the cool flavor of the month.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:18

And there was a AB testing and I'm like, I'm just going to use this, and so we made

Glen Lipka: 00:33:24

it and it did a thing, but it was just one story after the next that sounded really

Glen Lipka: 00:33:30

cool, but like I knew it wasn't something that was going to make a huge difference.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:37

And it was just about satisfying investors and about.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:42

Announcing things and acquisitions.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:44

We did so many acquisitions and I was like, why are we acquiring this company?

Glen Lipka: 00:33:47

They don't matter.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:49

You know, we could, build our own thing of this.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:51

It doesn't even do anything interesting.

Glen Lipka: 00:33:53

And I learned firsthand, like the power of the quarterly report.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:00

and I think it's a, there's a tyranny to it that makes it.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:03

So you have to make each story bigger than the last.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:06

You have to keep making, like these acquisitions and it's

Glen Lipka: 00:34:09

hard to integrate a company.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:12

And.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:12

I think that to avoid this problem to a certain degree, you have to

Glen Lipka: 00:34:20

separate out your product development from your investor relations.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:23

You have to say investor relations.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:26

I know you want us to make a bunch of cool stuff and we're not going to and that

Glen Lipka: 00:34:30

you're going to have to tell your stories.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:32

On your own, we're not going to acquire companies.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:34

We're not going to just make half baked software.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:38

You guys are on your own to tell the story that you're going to tell.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:40

And to a certain degree, it will depress the stock a little, however,

Glen Lipka: 00:34:46

your customers will continue to love this, the product, and that

Glen Lipka: 00:34:50

will increase the stock price.

Glen Lipka: 00:34:52

And so I think it washes out in the end, but you just can't let

Glen Lipka: 00:34:57

your investor relations arm dictate your product development strategy.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:02

And I think this is very much, a Steve Jobs way of thinking about things, that

Glen Lipka: 00:35:07

he would, when he came out with the iPhone, there was a bunch of people,

Glen Lipka: 00:35:12

and it's hard to imagine this at the time, who were saying, you're idiots,

Glen Lipka: 00:35:16

you're going to ruin your iPod business.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:19

Because they were just like, look how much money you make in iPod, you're

Glen Lipka: 00:35:21

going to cannibalize that business.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:24

think of the mindset that you have to be in to say that Steve Jobs is an

Glen Lipka: 00:35:28

idiot for coming out with the iPhone.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:31

But that's literally what people said.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:33

And there's a bunch of videos of him talking about some of this stuff.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:36

One guy is giving him a horrible time about not understanding what the open

Glen Lipka: 00:35:41

doc format does or something like that.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:44

And he's trying to explain to the person that that's not

Glen Lipka: 00:35:47

how you build a great company.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:50

You build a great company.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:51

By sticking to your values and by creating things that you think are great

Glen Lipka: 00:35:57

and taking the time it takes to do it.

Glen Lipka: 00:35:59

If you do great things, there'll be stories to tell.

Glen Lipka: 00:36:03

There'll be announcements, but if you focus on the announcement, you

Glen Lipka: 00:36:08

probably won't build a great thing.

Justin Norris: 00:36:11

And, you know, I've wrestled with this a lot because.

Justin Norris: 00:36:17

I've seen them focus Marketo and, almost every other company I can think of

Justin Norris: 00:36:21

that's reached the stage, focus more and more of their effort on products

Justin Norris: 00:36:26

or new features or new modules that are going to add incremental bookings.

Justin Norris: 00:36:29

So they want to roll things out that are going to increase contract value.

Justin Norris: 00:36:33

Meanwhile, there's a backlog, a million miles long of like features

Justin Norris: 00:36:37

that users every day are like, I need this, I need this, I need this.

Justin Norris: 00:36:40

And you can understand the logic because they say, well, no, one's going to

Justin Norris: 00:36:43

churn because of this one missing thing.

Justin Norris: 00:36:46

So let's focus on this.

Justin Norris: 00:36:47

And like, it's a spreadsheet math.

Justin Norris: 00:36:49

And if you go against it, you just seem like you're this, crafts

Justin Norris: 00:36:52

person who doesn't really understand economics and doesn't care about

Justin Norris: 00:36:55

shareholder value, et cetera.

Justin Norris: 00:36:56

But I think what they're missing and what you've described is this long game where

Justin Norris: 00:37:01

like the product becomes less lovable, it loses its integrity, loses its value in

Justin Norris: 00:37:06

the eyes of the people that use it most.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:08

two good examples of that in Marketo, history is AB testing.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:14

There was a, sales VP.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:16

Who said we have to have AB testing.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:18

We keep losing deals because of AB testing.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:21

And I'm like, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:24

And, he insisted.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:26

So we built AB testing.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:29

The analytics show that 97 percent of all users use it about 3 percent of the time.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:36

And that 3 percent of the users use it like 97 percent of the time.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:41

So in other words, there's this very, very small group of people that love it.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:45

And most people were like, I tried it once.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:47

And I remember a user once told me, you're, killing me with A

Glen Lipka: 00:37:51

B testing and I asked them why.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:53

And they said, I used to only have to write one email and

Glen Lipka: 00:37:56

now I need to write two emails.

Glen Lipka: 00:37:59

Thanks, Glen.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:01

And I'm creating work for him.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:04

And, on the flip side were tokens, which nobody asked for.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:10

Nobody asked for tokens.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:13

But I said, no, none of these are going to be cool.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:16

And it's because of my position in the company and I could just

Glen Lipka: 00:38:20

make certain things happen.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:21

And it just made tokens happen.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:24

Tokens ended up being like one of the most powerful features used by everybody.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:29

incredibly powerful feature, but nobody asked for it.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:34

And in the demo, you don't even like talk about it necessarily all that much.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:38

but it was one of those things that made Marketo what it was, that was

Glen Lipka: 00:38:42

maybe one of the last big features that were like that, just came from a place

Glen Lipka: 00:38:51

of, ah, this would be cool, right?

Glen Lipka: 00:38:55

Instead of a place of, this will tell a good story.

Glen Lipka: 00:38:59

So like AB testing on the one hand

Glen Lipka: 00:39:02

And tokens

Glen Lipka: 00:39:02

on the other.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:03

every company has the ability to do that kind of work.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:07

And they have people who know, but I think that product managers Don't

Glen Lipka: 00:39:14

they're not taught how to do that.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:16

They're it's a lost art in product management.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:20

And most of the time, product managers are feature people.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:24

They just want to like pummel the user with release features.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:29

And instead of thinking there's certain kinds of features that expand your story,

Glen Lipka: 00:39:35

like more flow steps might do that.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:39

There's certain ones that expand the surface area, like tokens allow

Glen Lipka: 00:39:43

for new kinds of things to happen.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:46

but most of the time they're just like, well, they voted on these features.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:51

Let's do the ones that they voted for.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:53

It's a lack of imagination.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:54

But I think most companies, they have people who can do it.

Glen Lipka: 00:39:57

And I think as a society, we just don't value this very much.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:01

We don't value innovation.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:03

Like we value it in the genius CEO, but we don't value it as a

Glen Lipka: 00:40:07

regular old job that people have.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:11

Most designers that I meet, they don't understand differentiation.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:14

They don't understand how to do real innovation.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:17

They don't understand how to think about products this way, and they're

Glen Lipka: 00:40:21

not being taught how to do it.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:24

And it's not being valued in them.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:25

If they do it, it's very difficult.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:28

There's a lot of companies that hate me.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:30

They hate that I do this.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:32

And which is why I, I feel great when I.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:35

Land in a place of where they value it and they care about it.

Glen Lipka: 00:40:39

But real magic happens when you empower the people in your organization

Glen Lipka: 00:40:44

who get this kind of concept.

Justin Norris: 00:40:46

What do you think about HubSpot and as a product company and

Justin Norris: 00:40:50

what they've been able to do, because they, it seems to me that they have

Justin Norris: 00:40:55

pursued a slightly different course than their peers in the marketing

Justin Norris: 00:40:59

automation space and have continued to expand what they do, but in a way.

Justin Norris: 00:41:04

Like it feels they haven't lost that mojo, so to speak.

Justin Norris: 00:41:07

Maybe it's gone up and down, but overall they still have this

Justin Norris: 00:41:10

tight knit, passionate group of users and it still feels like

Justin Norris: 00:41:13

they have that energy behind them.

Justin Norris: 00:41:15

Do you, do you share that perception?

Justin Norris: 00:41:16

And if you do, why do you think that is?

Glen Lipka: 00:41:19

I remember when I first saw them, they said they

Glen Lipka: 00:41:21

were marketing automation for the fortune 50, 000 or something like

Glen Lipka: 00:41:24

that, or the fortune 5 million.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:27

it was, very clever because Eloqua was clearly the enterprise.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:33

We were clearly the mid market.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:35

And they said, we're going to take the low end.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:39

and I thought that was really smart positioning.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:41

Positioning is another concept that very often gets overlooked,

Glen Lipka: 00:41:45

but it's super important.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:47

You have to be in the middle.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:49

You can't be the too expensive one and you can't be the cheap one.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:52

You need to be the Goldilocks provider.

Glen Lipka: 00:41:56

And, I think Marquetto had that for a long time and then started to lose it actually.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:00

As HubSpot started coming up.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:04

I think that their positioning was really smart.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:06

I remember seeing their UI and thinking there was some parts of it that were fine.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:14

they would put the responses on the landing page object itself, but instead

Glen Lipka: 00:42:20

of like a smart campaign where it's abstracted, they would say, Oh, take

Glen Lipka: 00:42:24

the landing page, flip it upside down, and it says what to do when someone

Glen Lipka: 00:42:27

fills it out, which in some ways is like, you know, That's clever and easy.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:33

In other ways, it's more limiting, right?

Glen Lipka: 00:42:36

But very often limiting is not as limiting as you might think.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:39

And that it's, if it's close enough that you can say, Oh, it's a religious war.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:45

I think it should be, and somebody else thinks it shouldn't be.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:48

And, that way you get half the market.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:50

I think that did a really good job of their branding.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:53

I think they did an amazing job with their content HubSpot content was.

Glen Lipka: 00:42:59

and they did a lot of things that I think were close enough.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:05

That's the thing about a lot of software close enough is really fine.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:10

It's then it becomes about your differentiation and

Glen Lipka: 00:43:12

about what you're doing.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:14

it's not all about the features.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:15

And I think they never focused on having the most features.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:19

So I wasn't ever the let's analyze the comp, the competitive product guy.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:26

I just, I knew what we were doing and I focused on that.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:30

but I definitely appreciated their positioning, their marketing,

Glen Lipka: 00:43:34

their content, their willingness to try different things.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:38

I think that their play into CRM, lightweight CRM was brilliant.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:43

Cause then they were like, you don't need Salesforce.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:45

There was a lot of people who were just like sick to death of Salesforce, whereas

Glen Lipka: 00:43:50

with Marketo, you had to have Salesforce.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:52

You couldn't have Marketo and not Salesforce.

Glen Lipka: 00:43:56

there was a period where I thought Marketo was going to be acquired by Salesforce

Glen Lipka: 00:44:01

and, the CEOs, Mark Benioff and Phil Fernandez got into it in some weird way.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:05

And, the stories were, how it didn't work out, but I just thought we

Glen Lipka: 00:44:10

were like a perfect fit for them.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:13

it just goes to show how You really don't know how things are going

Glen Lipka: 00:44:16

to turn out in the middle of it.

Justin Norris: 00:44:18

I want to, in the time we have left, switch gears a little bit and

Justin Norris: 00:44:21

just think about AI and open ended topic.

Justin Norris: 00:44:24

I know you're just someone who likes to think about technology and

Justin Norris: 00:44:28

trends and where things are going.

Justin Norris: 00:44:30

And I'd be curious for your read on the current situation, either AI impacting

Justin Norris: 00:44:34

your workflow as a product designer, like AI for product designers, or

Justin Norris: 00:44:38

just AI as being incorporated into products as a builder of things, take

Justin Norris: 00:44:42

it whichever direction you please.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:43

It hasn't affected anything from a, make product perspective.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:49

it's definitely in the middle of the hype cycle right now where

Glen Lipka: 00:44:51

it's, the peak of expectations.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:54

And it'll probably fall into the trough of disillusionment at some point.

Glen Lipka: 00:44:58

I think that there's this very strong desire on the part of human beings to,

Glen Lipka: 00:45:04

To have a friend that can't escape, that it's not exactly a slave, but

Glen Lipka: 00:45:13

it's like, it goes on my phone and it seems to have free will, but it can't,

Glen Lipka: 00:45:19

betray me and it can't be mean to me.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:23

It has to always be nice to me.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:24

And it's like a friend.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:26

I think that that desire is nearly overwhelming.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:30

in human beings, and that we desperately want this.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:35

And then along comes something like ChatGPT, and it, talks, and

Glen Lipka: 00:45:40

it seems like it can't go anywhere.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:43

But then, you realize it's kind of an idiot.

Glen Lipka: 00:45:48

I had said to ChatGPT, when I was younger, there was this poem about a

Glen Lipka: 00:45:54

coal miner who, when he went to work, his Children were in bed unconscious.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:00

And when he came back home, his Children were in bed unconscious.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:02

And in his mind, his Children were in a coma, right?

Glen Lipka: 00:46:06

And it was only because he worked very long hours early

Glen Lipka: 00:46:08

in the morning, late at night.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:10

And I had kids at the time, and it had made me sad of, like, working too hard.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:15

And so I said, Chachi B'tee, what is this poem?

Glen Lipka: 00:46:17

And I described it.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:18

And it goes, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:19

I know what poem you're talking about.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:21

And it told me the author and the name of the poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:23

And it even listed the poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:24

I'm reading it and I'm like, something's not right.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:27

This, this is not the poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:29

So I Google it.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:30

And I'm like, there's an author that it cited.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:33

But they didn't write this poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:35

And I was just like, so I said to Chachi B.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:37

T., I can't find this poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:39

And they were like, Oh, that's because I made it up.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:42

And I was like, okay,

Glen Lipka: 00:46:46

don't make up a poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:47

I'm there is an existing real poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:50

And it goes, Oh yeah, I gotcha.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:51

And I'm like, I just want to know the author of that poem and I'll go find it.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:56

And it's like, yeah, it's this author and here's the text.

Glen Lipka: 00:46:58

It wrote another poem, a completely new poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:04

And I'm just like, dude, what are you doing?

Glen Lipka: 00:47:07

And it's just like, well, I couldn't find the poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:09

So I made it and it, looked me dead in the eye and said, this

Glen Lipka: 00:47:13

is a real poem and a real author.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:15

And it was written in 1874 and it made a whole backstory for this poem.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:20

And I'm like, why are you lying to me?

Glen Lipka: 00:47:24

And the answer is.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:25

Because people want a confident answer I don't want to not

Glen Lipka: 00:47:30

give you a confident answer.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:31

I was like, but I asked for the truth and it goes, I don't really

Glen Lipka: 00:47:35

understand what you mean by truth.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:38

I understand what you mean by tell me the answer to a question.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:42

And I could write something that looks a lot like the answer to your question.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:47

It's not true.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:48

It's not real, but it looks a lot like the answer to your question.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:52

This is what we have today.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:56

This is what AI is.

Glen Lipka: 00:47:58

I remember way back, there was a famous Marketo sponsored

Glen Lipka: 00:48:01

bake off of lead scoring.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:04

And they had like, I think it was Lattice or somebody, and

Glen Lipka: 00:48:06

it had an AI scoring thing.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:09

So we had the Marketo way, we had rules, and you had the AI way.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:13

They let it bake.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:15

They let the sales happen.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:17

Turns out, six in one, half a dozen in the other.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:21

Nobody won.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:22

But marketers overwhelmingly said, well, if it doesn't matter, then

Glen Lipka: 00:48:25

I'm going to do it the rules.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:26

Because if I just have a button that does it, what do you need me for?

Glen Lipka: 00:48:30

like I want to be paid for doing work.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:33

And if there's a button to do my job, then that doesn't bode

Glen Lipka: 00:48:37

well for my career prospects.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:39

And so I don't think anybody truly wants AI to do their job.

Glen Lipka: 00:48:45

I think they want a slave on their phone that can't leave and it's got

Glen Lipka: 00:48:50

to be nice to them and that maybe can do some things for their job

Glen Lipka: 00:48:56

to make their job easier, but only in so far as it can't replace them.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:03

That as soon as it replaces them, it's a problem, but as long as it doesn't replace

Glen Lipka: 00:49:07

them, then help being helpful is fine.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:09

for example, in Figma, if it named my layers for me, great.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:14

But if it came up with the differentiated, point of view of like, oh, you should do

Glen Lipka: 00:49:18

tokens and here's how tokens should work.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:21

I don't think that's going to fly, but there's nothing that I've seen in

Glen Lipka: 00:49:25

any AI yet where it can do honestly.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:29

Anything relating to product development.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:32

I think an area where it might be good at is, testing like, Selenium script

Glen Lipka: 00:49:39

writing, looking for vulnerabilities where like there's a buffer overflow, problem.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:44

And it could find that in the code and fix those kinds of things.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:48

I think like code helpers, syntax helpers, all of that is useful.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:54

maybe some illustrations, but even those, like, they're kind of terrible.

Glen Lipka: 00:49:59

I don't mean to pour water on everybody's idea of AI.

Glen Lipka: 00:50:03

I just think it's wildly overhyped and mostly based on a psychological need,

Glen Lipka: 00:50:09

as opposed to a real technical ability.

Justin Norris: 00:50:12

No, I mean, that's really interesting.

Justin Norris: 00:50:13

I've seen the same things that you've seen.

Justin Norris: 00:50:15

I remember even coming up for the name of this podcast.

Justin Norris: 00:50:17

I was like brainstorming ideas and it was like, give me a list of like 20 words,

Justin Norris: 00:50:21

like associated with this aesthetic.

Justin Norris: 00:50:23

And it would give me a list of 20 words of which like maybe seven were duplicates.

Justin Norris: 00:50:26

I'm like, can you please just give me a clean list of 20 with no duplicates?

Justin Norris: 00:50:30

It's like, Oh, sorry, sorry.

Justin Norris: 00:50:31

Here you go.

Justin Norris: 00:50:32

Again, the same, like that sort of thing.

Justin Norris: 00:50:34

It's like, what, what, but then I've seen, like, I'm using it to

Justin Norris: 00:50:37

create images for my sub stack.

Justin Norris: 00:50:40

I'm like, give me an image of this in like a 1950s sort of cartoon

Justin Norris: 00:50:44

jazz aesthetic and like, it does it.

Justin Norris: 00:50:47

And it's got weird wonky things in it, but It's okay for my sub stack and to

Justin Norris: 00:50:50

pay an illustrator to do that by hand would be completely cost prohibitive.

Justin Norris: 00:50:54

and so it seems that there is this niche where you can use it to get things done

Justin Norris: 00:50:57

or, automate certain things that you would otherwise have to do, I agree

Justin Norris: 00:51:00

completely that nobody needs to be replaced and the psychological need of

Justin Norris: 00:51:04

like the friend that's almost the part that creeps me out the most, to be honest,

Justin Norris: 00:51:07

because if you have someone who's always emotionally available, you know, can't

Justin Norris: 00:51:13

Not want to give you attention, et cetera.

Justin Norris: 00:51:15

What use do you have for real human relationships after a point in time?

Justin Norris: 00:51:19

And that's the part that scares me about AI.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:22

I do worry about those things.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:24

At the same time, I feel that loneliness is a debilitating feeling.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:34

there's a reason that having a friend on your phone is so useful.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:39

There's a reason why something like Twitter works.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:41

Like people want to be heard so badly.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:46

That they're willing to talk to crazy people just to get that.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:52

I think that we're living in incredibly interesting times and

Glen Lipka: 00:51:56

yeah, we're making some cool products.

Glen Lipka: 00:51:59

We're also changing the world in a way that's very scary.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:04

we're certainly entering a post truth world.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:08

and I think Adobe is more than any other company, responsible for

Glen Lipka: 00:52:12

the capabilities of deep fakes.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:14

And that for your substack illustrations, there's some designer

Glen Lipka: 00:52:18

out there that's like really bummed.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:20

He used to get work and that's an area that AI is doing better than most.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:26

But what happens to those designers?

Glen Lipka: 00:52:28

What happens to humanity?

Glen Lipka: 00:52:31

Cause one of the things about AI is also, it's, what it's fed.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:34

It only knows how to make the thing that has been made before, like a 1950s

Glen Lipka: 00:52:40

style or whatever, but what is a 2040s?

Glen Lipka: 00:52:44

Style look like, nobody knows that yet.

Glen Lipka: 00:52:47

And if we're not training, designers, if we're not giving designers

Glen Lipka: 00:52:51

a living, then who is going to

Glen Lipka: 00:52:55

make

Glen Lipka: 00:52:55

that.

Justin Norris: 00:52:56

We'll never have it.

Justin Norris: 00:52:57

It'll just be endlessly regurgitated content back and forth into the model.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:01

with that said, maybe we're becoming so efficient that

Glen Lipka: 00:53:06

people can have those sorts of jobs without it being a career.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:11

Like I'm a big fan of universal basic income where we can

Glen Lipka: 00:53:14

pay people enough to live.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:17

And so they can be artists without starving.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:20

They can be musicians without starving.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:23

I think that the world is changing.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:25

It's important for all of us to not be reactive, not just assume

Glen Lipka: 00:53:29

it's going to be bad, but also don't assume it's going to be good.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:32

we have to think about the details and.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:36

Keep trying to goose humanity forward.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:40

So we make innovative things, in new and different ways.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:46

Creativity, I think is more a value that people will.

Glen Lipka: 00:53:52

Care about in the future, not less, the more AI, the more

Glen Lipka: 00:53:56

automation, the more technology helps us, the more that creativity

Glen Lipka: 00:54:00

matters.

Justin Norris: 00:54:01

And I think you can see it like in the rise of platforms like

Justin Norris: 00:54:04

Etsy, which is specifically about like people valuing something handmade.

Justin Norris: 00:54:08

of course, all the like mass producers are snuck onto Etsy now as well, and degrading

Justin Norris: 00:54:12

the quality of that, but you're right.

Justin Norris: 00:54:14

There is a hunger for something like, I want something built by hand,

Justin Norris: 00:54:17

something that wasn't scaled, something that's unique, that's one of a kind.

Justin Norris: 00:54:21

I know we're, out of time, but Glenn, this was just a fascinating discussion.

Justin Norris: 00:54:25

So, glad you were able to join us today.

Glen Lipka: 00:54:28

Thank you for inviting me.

Glen Lipka: 00:54:29

This has been great.

Glen Lipka: 00:54:29

And I really

Glen Lipka: 00:54:30

enjoyed talking with you today.