Transcription:
So I'd like to tell you what one of the most exciting stories that has happened during the whole craziness of this pandemic, was when bocce was sold to Medallia for a sizable sum of money. And we were so thrilled to see this whole thing happen. Because, you know, it's a success story that's been in the making for like 13 1415 years. And it was one of the things that was mother's raises shining light that was happening during these crazy times. And I'm so excited to tell that story tonight. I'm pumped, that's all I can say.
We were happy. There's always it's always like a ray of sunshine in the middle of in the middle of darkness. And I like to do a lot of innovation that occurs in the darkest time. So thank you, Mike, for being on what you want to give us a little bit of background and then we can really talk about where you are today.
Yeah, yes. First of all, thank you for the invitation of the CVB. So it's awesome to be with you guys. So I've been with Voci a couple years and I was brought in right after the D round investment. We had a couple of VCs come in from the Mid Atlantic and was really looking at Pittsburgh to invest right there's a lot of good things going on in Pittsburgh and over the last few years we changed the go to market we grew the company 60 70% attracted a lot of partners a lot of users and and and just for everybody's sake, we bowtie builds a speech to text engine, right? And if we draw the top talent from CMU and pet, another top universities around the world, think about bocce is the Ferrari of speech to text engines.
Porsche Ferrari, I'm always going to insult somebody new in my car analogies, you know, you're the best.
And more importantly, were the most powerful, the most accurate. We deliver you know, credible results to customers and partners. So yeah, where we are, I was excited to join the company. And we have a great employee base here in Pittsburgh, I couldn't have picked a better partner than Medallia to, to, to hand the reins over and to take this division, our division of die off, I'll continue on and run the division. And we're just having a lot of fun and we're going to the integration. And you mentioned during the pandemic, I mean, it's incredible to try to onboard but getting the deal done. It's, well you say oh my gosh, I know that's challenging, right? But you know, all the due diligence and all the things you go through, but onboarding all these employees in Pittsburgh is has been a real challenge. I got my hat's off to Medallia, their pros that doing this and you could just get a sense that we tucked right in underneath them and it's been it's been a lot of fun so far. So they're going to continue their commitment here in the Pittsburgh area. They had over 15 people in Pittsburgh, a lot of that were true medallions prefer their back position, no office, everybody worked out of their home. And now we have a base of operations here in the Strip District. We just opened up our offices about eight, nine months ago. Unfortunately, we're just getting the new car smell out of the office. And then we all now work. You know, it's, I think it's gonna be a different world. We're going to probably go back sometime in probably late fall. And, and oh,
how many people are in that in that office?
We have. So we have 60 in the company. But we've been working remote since day one. We have people in an eight pack with developers. We have the best and brightest. We don't care where they are. Right? Or we have people in UK, Canada. So in the office specific we had about 4045 people and what
do you think? growth. What's the growth trajectory?
Yeah. So we're fully funded going forward with Medallia. And we'll probably add, probably this year. No, I mean, gosh, we're six. We're halfway through the year, by the way, just a little reminder crazy. No, I gotta be careful. This could be a thick a 221 already, but probably around will probably add about five headcount. Okay. But they may not be in Pittsburgh. Right, right. We don't know, right? We I trust my employees, you know, you got to empower them. You know, my marketing director, Stephanie has not yet been in the office yet. And he told me that like our first day. That's great.
So you have so the commitment to Pittsburgh, as you know, as a home base was still there, and you'll look to add people from wherever they can add people. I would What do you think about this whole working from home? I mean, when you think about voice to text and everything, you've already been in this sort of non physical environment for a long time, like close to your culture?
No, you hit it right on the nail on the head on both our partners, customers, our supply chain. We're not we're not, you know, beholden to a supply chain that's overseas or anything like that. So we're not hardware based, although we can use, you know, mostly cloud and infrastructure stuff. And we can hire the best and brightest around the world. So right, during this time, right, unfortunately, right. But the little bright spot for bocce was, we didn't really see a hiccup in our business delivery, although our partners may not have been so lucky. So we've seen a lot of deals get delayed. Yeah, it's just unfortunate. And we see that across the board, however, right? I mean, you know, there's certain context centers and costs centers around the world. The call volumes are off the charts. And then thought about that exactly right.
Yeah, think about United Airlines as an example. All right, and they're a big customer of ours, right? So we support those big contact centers and the scale and so we're seeing a nice uptick in usage. And it's good to be able to support our customers during the pandemic when people are trying to get answers to their questions. And there's my health insurance isn't going to cover this. It's my Can I can I get this kind of medication? We're really strong in healthcare, financial services, Travel and Leisure. And, you know, in, you know, the financial industry, where's my stimulus check? Is that clear, you know, people calling and during the time the pandemic people are, I think being more connected using the phone today than any other mechanism. So we're seeing a lot of increase in call volume.
All that fifth person ology which is so cool, and it's all that happened, I remember that was first coming out back in the day like there's like three or four folks in the vo t offices. It was like technology being spun from CMU and to see that trajectory what you guys have done over the past 14 or so years. It's just like, man, we Pittsburgh, I just love it.
Well, if you if you're on our offices that long ago, you you need to come to our new offices. Yes. Yeah.
You know, it's so interesting because the the many of the companies or the the markets that you just conveyed are markets that have been really hit hard, but what many people might not realize is the need for support is probably is at an all time high. Exactly. All those markets are hit hard. Yeah, everyone is actually grappling or trying to figure out their ways to navigate that.
Yeah, I mean, we're we're in the midst right now and things about it right, especially with Medallia. And I don't know if you you guys know a lot about Medallia, but they're a customer experience platform. And they're really listening to customers. So when you're thinking about going to Home Depot or Airbnb, or or these experiences where you might think there's a decline, there's really an uptick and trying to listen to customers, this would be how they're responding to COVID. You know, I'm a big user of Home Depot. And, you know, they're changed the way they've interacted with their customers. So they're constantly looking for feedback. And they want to know, do these changes, how is that affecting our customer experience? So it's really important, right? That they they listen, and they get these signals that are driving, you know, the right kind of behaviors as companies make these shifts, right. And now we're going to power the voice of Medallia, which is pretty cool.
That's really cool. So why are you using Home Depot, so My What's up?
I got more projects going on then you would like to have a lot of time on my hands right I got nothing else to do say that they don't have time to do anything.
Yeah, it's interesting that whole work life balance and I got to make sure the employees you know, we have a fantastic CEO and he's given the company the next three Friday's off not only because of the pandemic because of the some of the social stress unrest going on out there to give people time to decompress, reflect and commit to whatever cause they're, they're interested in and give people that flexibility. And it really kind of I told the company when we sold Medallia or sold to Medallia that I felt like we picked the right partner and we really did. We were In a competitive situation, we had a couple of other people looking at us from an acquisition perspective and I, I chose to go down the path with the doubt yet and the reactions that the CEO has had over the past couple days has been tremendous. And I think the employee base here bocce is appreciates the the social responsibility this company's taken on so it's pretty awesome.
Yep, we're still there. Brand will live on we spent a bunch of money on hats, t shirts. Get going right.
We didn't get any How to cheat. Yeah, we want to have some
teacher teaching. All right, Stephanie will take care of her. She'll have
some voting kicks off later as well.
No to stop.
Okay, so we are very thrilled to have a conversation with you, Mike. Really appreciate your candor and and really cheers to the future. Yeah. It's really you're definitely something that we're proud about here in Pittsburgh. Whether people come from all over the world and work, it doesn't matter. We are still going to hang our hat and say that this is a Pittsburgh company. Well, that's fair to say, no matter where people work. It's It's the new world. Yeah, absolutely. You've made a remarkable, remarkable pivot in a time that many have thought that it's a dark time. Yeah. It's off to you. Thank you.
Thank you. Great. Yeah. Great to meet you. And thanks for the discussion. Absolutely. All right. I look forward to seeing you soon. Yeah.
I love it in the show on a high note like this super, super cool to show you pauses continues to happen here in Pittsburgh at the tech vibe radio is all about telling the stories. This has been Jonathan Kersting.
And this is Audrey Russo.
For more about us at the Pittsburgh Technology Council site. PGH tech.org and have yourself an awesome evening everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai