Samantha Keya: Welcome back to Eight Spotlight, the podcast brought to you by Eight Capital, where we go startup by startup, founder by founder, and bring you the stories behind our portfolio. ⁓ Today, we're joined Wayne Crosby, founder and CEO of Org Org, a company rethinking how organizations actually operate. Now, Wayne is no stranger to building category defining products. He previously founded Zentr, which became Google Slides, spent a decade at Google helping build G Suite and other major products, and later founded Humu, focused on making work better through behavioral science. Now with Org Org, he's tackling a problem most companies just accept, the chaos of running an organization across dozens of disconnected tools. Org Org is building an organizational productivity suite. a unified platform that replaces fragmented internal tools with one system designed to help teams operate, collaborate, and scale more effectively. Let's get into it. Wayne, so happy to have you here.
Wayne Crosby: I'm excited to be here. That was a great intro. Thank you so much.
Samantha Keya: Of course, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. So you've built companies across multiple eras of software. what stayed the same through building and what has changed?
Wayne Crosby: You Well, that's a great question because as you mentioned, I've been doing this for a long time. So I'm 25 years in the industry of building companies and it's been just incredible to see the change of what's happened. even when I, from the time that I started Orwar to the time that it is now, you know, when I started, was AI was just starting to come onto the scene and... I was still writing every line of code and maybe using it to help do a little bit of, ⁓ you know, help with challenging bugs may crop up. And fast forward to today and there's no more really writing software per se. You have to have like a systems understanding and be able to prompt the LLMs to move forward. But it's just been an incredible journey from, ⁓ know, ⁓ original kind of assembly level classes that I took in college all the way to being able to use natural language to build software to help people. And as you mentioned, you know, I think so that's like the biggest change is just like how you do it and where you get stuck. no longer get stuck in all of the, you know, we started Zenter we had these problems of, you know, how do you draw fonts on a webpage, right? Like this was a, this was an unsolved problem at the ⁓ And, and you you just don't, don't get stuck on any of these kind of technical details because there's enough knowledge and prior art out there that just like helps you kind of blow through them. That's been by far biggest change. The thing that stayed the same though ⁓ is, is really what drives me on OrgOrg which is I believe that software and ⁓ technology a role to play in ⁓ fulfilling basic human need of wanting to collaborate and work together. It's why started Zenter back in the day, because I got tired of emailing around PowerPoint presentations, and I just thought collaboration was a better ⁓ tool, and what people wanted. And I still believe that's true. I think that there's this fundamental human desire to to come together and work. build something that's bigger than what we could build by ourselves. That collaboration and that human element of software is still very much the same no matter what industry you go into. That's why I keep getting drawn back to this productivity space of just how do you help people find that enjoyment in working together.
Samantha Keya: after build tools used by ⁓ billions.
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. The last number I saw was about 3 billion users were on G Suite. So it's insane.
Samantha Keya: my goodness. That's many. Wow. Well, okay. So you achieved massive success there. So what made you want to go back to building from scratch?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ I've always been a builder. I love building from scratch. love the early stages of are just ⁓ most fun in my opinion, you know I've had big teams and small teams and ⁓ ⁓ ⁓ really enjoy kind of working in that creative space ⁓ Is this something that people want? Would this actually help figuring that out and doing that exploration through ambiguity and just exploration? And so when I left Google in 2016, was a kind of a crazy journey. I can just talk a little bit about that. When we first got started, Google bought us because they were looking at how can they expand beyond. search. so Chrome didn't exist, Android didn't exist, like none of these other things existed. Gmail had just come onto the scene and so they thought well maybe we can actually expand out and build a full productivity suite. But the world wasn't quite ready for it. And it took many, many, many years for it to gain adoption. And I remember early on just kind of looking at some of the numbers and being like, wow, you many years in the average number of documents in Google was still like one per user. And ⁓ took a long time to get the suite to the point where it was capable enough to be able to handle real world situations ⁓ and also ⁓ people's habits change enough to realize that collaboration really is this thing that helps you work better. And so it wasn't until about year seven that I was there that I was like, wow, this is actually going to go and this is really big and it's going to be bigger than anything. You know, it's bigger than Microsoft's Office suite and it's all, you know, all of these other things. And so that was really exciting. But by the time that it was there and I had done a bunch of other things at Google too, like my team was responsible for signing with Google if anybody's been using that ever. And I did a bunch of stuff on the machine. learning front in terms of the early AI elements have actually come to define what we're doing now with some ⁓ the on my team were the original authors of the transformer paper that kind of has ⁓ unlocked lot of the AI stuff that's today. So it was like an incredible journey and I loved every minute of it but by eight, nine years after had started it was a very different company ⁓ and ⁓ I had learned to navigate lot of bureaucracy. set my teams for success, but I wanted to get back to building. I felt like I could have a bigger impact in the world. I kind of ask myself this question every year. I do this to this day, which is... You know, time is precious and like, where can I have the biggest impact in the world? and for many, many years it was at Google because every time we launched anything, was, you it would hit millions users. and then I got to the point where it was like, actually, I think my biggest impact is going to be somewhere else. Let me go ahead and jump in to do another startup. and so at that time I had been working with the, the, the CHRO at name was Laszlo Baki. had written a New York Times bestseller in terms of like Google culture. And it had a Google had a huge halo around do people work? How do they use data ⁓ order to be able to influence the way that people work? And so he and I decided to off and go start another company called Humu, as you mentioned. ⁓ And that a really fun journey around, you know, the behavioral science and the behavioral economics of, you know, what is it that motivates us as people in a work How can we influence those things ⁓ so that
Samantha Keya: Mm-hmm.
Wayne Crosby: both the employee and the employer get the most out of that relationship. the ⁓ like science and psychology that ⁓ how people think and make decisions like fascinating to me. And ⁓ you know, we were at the point where technology was still coming on board with AI ⁓ and machine learning. And so, ⁓ maybe we can start to pick up some and ⁓ start to use a more data-driven approach to help work better. So did that for many years and that was really fun. then COVID hit and it got a lot harder. as it did for many companies during that time. we ended up deciding to sell the company to Perceptix, which is another great company. And I moved on to, I thought I was going to take a break, but my wife was like, know, there's no way you're going to be able to sit still. So I was like, okay, no, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the next month and I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to like sit here on the couch and I'm going to watch reruns of my favorite shows and like. That lasted about a week. And she's like, what were you doing up until 2 a.m. in the morning? I don't know. I was just like working on a project I had in mind, you know? And here we go again. So about that time, Michael Seichel from Y Combinator, who he and I had known each other from when I first did Y Combinator back in 2007, was entered.
Samantha Keya: I'm
Wayne Crosby: And he reached out and said, hey, saw you exited. Why don't you come be a partner at Y Combinator for a little bit and ⁓ partner and help out with next generation of founders. And ⁓ I that for a long time. And I really enjoyed it. But the funny thing that happened was after I had sold... a bunch of the employees, you know, they kind of a treated to other companies as happens after acquisition ⁓ they started reaching back out to me saying, Hey, what were those tools that we were using in who I want to bring to my new company? and I was like, well, those were just things that I built in nights and weekends and kind of inspired by. ⁓ the lessons that I've learned at Google and the tools that I've used at Google and kind of brought them to Humu and made them more for ⁓ companies. And said, hey, can you build me those? And I like, sure. know, let's just start building again on nights and weekends to help them out. And pretty quickly, we ended up with about 300 orgs on the platform. ⁓ and without even really trying. And I was like, oh, well, maybe there's something here again. And I talked to some of the folks over at Y Combinator and they're like, yeah, sure. Like, this makes perfect sense given your background and like, kind of, you know what the answers are here. You should give it a go again. And they convinced me to get started and jump back into the founder mode. So that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half or so.
Samantha Keya: Here we go again. awesome. So, I was going to ask you, like, what did you learn from your previous companies that directly shaved this one, but you just answered that.
Wayne Crosby: been this continuous journey of just trying to ⁓ look what problems are out there and are unsolved. And what skills I have that can bring to the table to help make the world a little bit better and make work a little bit better for people. And ⁓ just experimentation, right? And it's a lot of experimentation in the startup world. You almost never get it right on the first try. And so you have to kind of learn and grind and ⁓ grow each of your assumptions that you have that you believe are truths. But then you launch a product and ⁓ the tells you, actually, you don't understand my problem. And then got to learn from it. ⁓ grow and you got to reiterate, right? And I just love that process.
Samantha Keya: So where does this passion come from of making work better?
Wayne Crosby: That's a good question. If you had told me when I was in college that this was the space that I would end up in, I would have told you you're crazy. I would have been like, no, video games or entertainment. But as I went on in my career, found that I just was really drawn. There this moment in time at Google where I was managing a couple of teams. ⁓ And paper, they ⁓ amazing. employee ⁓ came from fantastic background and was able to write amazing code think really creatively individually. But this ⁓ one was just consistently outperforming performing this other team. I got really curious about like, why is that? Why is that actually happening? Because ⁓ they should be about equally. Like what else is going on besides just the skills and the tools that they're using, right? ⁓ There's like this other ⁓ more thing that's happening. And that's when I really started to get into like the behavioral science aspect of it and ⁓ the team and like how is it that like... people come together and sometimes they do amazing things and sometimes it's just kind of okay. And sometimes it's like it's a total disaster, right? Like something there that is unsolved and really interesting and there's more and more research that's going into it, but the psychology of it really got me interested in that. ⁓ And as I thought more deeply about it, ⁓ as kind of moved into, at one in time in my Google career, I joined the... this team called the Machine Intelligence team. was just getting started. early, like I mentioned, early days of AI. And I ran into this one researcher and I was like, oh, cool. What are you working on? And he's like, well, I'm working on like thinking about what a world in a post work environment looks like. And I was like, oh, interesting. Why are you doing that? Because like, clearly there's a lot to do. And he's like, well, AI is going to be successful. It's clear to me. And this was back in 2012. maybe even earlier, And I was just like, you are crazy. You are way out there, dude, but like you're in a research group. So, okay, fine. Go do your research. But as I thought about it more, I got really, had like this existential moment where it was like, do I really want to be a part of a team that potentially to a post-war world? I find lot of satisfaction in the work I do. I find a lot of fulfillment in like helping other people. And so what this actually mean? And I had a lot of conversations with this guy and he's super thoughtful. And I came to the conclusion that I think that work is fundamentally human, as I mentioned earlier. I think that we as human beings, we are social creatures, we like to come together, we like to collaborate and build together. And so I think that at the end of the day, we're gonna do this regardless of whether or not they're... I think the work is going to transform and change dramatically over the next decade. We're already starting to see it. But that fundamental desire to work together doesn't ever go away. And once I realized that it was intrinsic to being human, to want to work, and whatever shape that takes, that's when I got really interested in being like, OK, this is a space that I want to really play into and lean into. The productivity suite that I built for G Suite happened to be an opportunity that I saw. But then as I dug into it more, I was just like, yes, this is part of being human, and we should There's nothing more valuable than like helping bring that out and make it easier for people to experience
Samantha Keya: That's really cool.
Wayne Crosby: I know most people think of work as like this thing that they have to do and it kind of sucks. And I think that's true for a lot of people, but I think we've lost sight ever basically ever since, like just to get a little philosophical here for a second, ever since the industrial revolution, we've been like putting people in smaller and smaller boxes and say, this is your playground, right? And like, you become the expert of this thing. But I really think that that takes away from the humanness ⁓ what we actually want to do. And so ⁓ the first time ever, ⁓ in opinion, and certainly in my career, I feel like... We're expanding roles as opposed to like putting them into more and more expertise roles because you can have a smaller team now that has ⁓ know marketing expertise product expertise design expertise Sales expertise all ⁓ like enabled agents ⁓ and and you're able to get work done in a way that is so empowering and and feels amazing because you're you're not blocked by somebody else you're not being told If you're on a small team that where everybody has agency, you're not being told, you know You can't go explore this other place that might be interesting to you, right? No, you're a software engineer. You write code you don't you know been in some places that are like you don't even talk to the customers right and and I think that's it's just fascinating to me to see the world go through this transformation of like No, ⁓ with power of a lot of these agents and tools you can do a whole bunch more than what is young to defined inside of your box companies are seeing the value in that for the first time and think that's that's a real unlock for everybody.
Samantha Keya: Yeah. ⁓ So talked little bit about how ⁓ companies rely dozens of point solutions to their organizations. Why has software evolved way, do you think?
Wayne Crosby: Oh, that's an interesting one too. Because software has typically been hard to build. And so if you, if you like, I think. Well, certainly most engineers are familiar with a company called PagerDuty. It's a company that helps monitor your production systems and then automatically alerts engineers whenever there's issues or ⁓ it needs to be escalated to somebody to look at a production system, ⁓ can page them and sets up rotations. And this a company that ⁓ was, it out of Y Combinator back in ⁓ the 2008 nine or something like that. And at that moment in time, it was like really hard to build that like interacted with telephone systems ⁓ other things ⁓ and up schedules and like Google calendar didn't really like barely existed at that time too. Like there was like nothing in place in order to be able to support this. And it was really hard. And so they ended up building multi-billion dollar public company out of being able to just like connect these systems. make it easier for people to do these things. because it was hard, ⁓ basically had to stay roughly in their lane about this is the type of product that we build and offer. And continued over and and over until literally just a couple of years ago, where it was just impossible. ⁓ The amount resources, you were at Google or a Meta or one of these giant companies, the amount of resources you to build just a single product was staggering. so the advice that was given over and over from venture capital and startup advice was go narrow, go deep, be the best solution that you can possibly for this ⁓ individual point-wise solution that you're doing and that's how you're going to find success. ⁓ that's kind of how the market grew ⁓ it was a best of breeds kind of solution, you know, world where you would pick and choose the different tools that you wanted. And then all of a sudden AI came onto the scene and again like this the entire software industry has been built up with the premise that the most expensive part of doing software is the part of building. of a sudden, almost overnight, that was flipped on its head and that became one of the cheapest parts of the entire product buildings. Right? And it was just like the entire world got flipped upside down. And so all of these companies that had spent years and years building a very narrow thing, you know, they're just of in a tough spot because they either have to choose to completely change the way that they think and start to or they're going to get consumed by some company that's coming up that's building a bunch of these other more suite-like solutions. And so that's where ⁓ idea of where we're came from was like okay the opportunity is right between, and industries constantly go through kind of like bundling and unbundling phases, and it's very clear that we're in a strong bundling phase right now, but it's even different than ⁓ what seen in the past because Even in a bundled solution, a lot of times people would have to take a, you know, like an 80 % product, as opposed to getting the exact thing that they wanted. And, and now with AI, everybody's like, well, no, I want exactly the thing that I, that I'm looking for. Like 80 % is no longer good enough. And so not only are we in like this, this phase where we're bundling again, but we're also in this like hyper personalized, software stack that like, has to be tailored specifically to your needs. that's ⁓ a new and interesting challenge that's presenting to every company that's running right now.
Samantha Keya: So how do you tackle that at org-org where everybody wants something just slightly different?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah, well, it's part of that is the fact that we're able to build so much faster. And so when people are asking for particular things, we're able to accommodate them or the infrastructure. on the internet is really good now, so we're able to like spin up new things to be able to support them. And so it's ⁓ of this is ⁓ speed. In the past, most people had had to say no, and now we can say yes. ⁓ And that's been ⁓ I think other thing is that... And if we want to like look a little bit talked a lot about the past but we want to look forward a little bit in terms of like what this actually ⁓ like And not quite there yet, but but it seems clear to me And this is to like kind of, a confusing concept, but bear with me for a second. I think that ⁓ just entering ⁓ stage where a web application is becoming the default so what I was, ⁓ I'll tell this story I think it's fascinating ⁓ as a founder of slides and somebody who's ⁓ used slide software their career. ⁓ For the first time I was giving a presentation to another group and I was just like, man, like mucking with slides is so painful after working with, know, cloud code and building all this really cool stuff. was like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna build an app for my presentation. And it was so much better, so much faster. the, I was able to like create interactive elements, right? As part of a web application experience. And, and know, you just like tell it, it's like, cool. I want like a slide format and ⁓ here's, roughly the story that I want to lay out. And here's kind of the interactive elements I want. And it, it ⁓ built just a phenomenal presentation in a matter of minutes, as opposed to ⁓ trying muck around with stylistic elements or alignment or, you know, all of these other things that get in the way. ⁓ of actually communicating some idea. And so as we look forward, think applications are going to become the new document. And you're going to see basically as many applications come into the world as you see documents today, which is kind of like a weird concept. they're so dynamic and they're so expressive to be able to tell exactly the story that you want and so easy to create that I think that there's this really compelling journey. that we're on to be able to communicate better as people. And I think the old productivity suites are pretty broken at this point. it's gonna take a decade for people to get there, but it's absolutely gonna happen.
Samantha Keya: So do you think of org-org as a productivity suite or do you think of it like as an internal operating system? How do you classify it in your mind?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah, so we've trying talk through the different brainings of this. And one of the ones that I like is that is an organizational productivity suite. You have your employee productivity suite that is really ⁓ has been your docs, sheets and slides type of stuff. But there's a whole nother layer ⁓ of that you need ⁓ in to run an effective organization. And that's really where Orward comes in is to fill that gap of between the individual creating these artifacts ⁓ and the and that the organization. needs as a whole in order to be able to run effectively. And so it's things like you know really great employee profile pages and discovery of content and being able to ⁓ know share effectively ⁓ and create you know set these goals in a way that ⁓ are to understand and maintain as opposed to just being like put into a document and never looked at again. There's a bunch of stuff that you just kind of need to support organizations that historically has been pretty bad.
Samantha Keya: So what's the most interesting way you've seen someone use org-org?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ that's a good question. So I'd say that like we have, there's a of the tooling that we have in place has not been ⁓ rocket science. It's you know, existing kind of these SaaS companies that, ⁓ or ⁓ a of that have used point-wise solutions before. ⁓ And then they're basically adopting our solution because it's. as good and cheaper and everything else. So they're like on that front, there hasn't been a ton of innovation. It's the story is really around bundling. and they just like start with one tool and then they add another. and kind of build up from there. But what we're working on right now, and this is a little bit of a precursor, but I just saw a demo from one of our interns yesterday and I was like, yes, that is it. That is what we're trying to do. He basically just had a spreadsheet of, he runs a club at UC Davis and it's a club that builds drones to help firefighters in California. It's like a very noble and cool club. And he had a spreadsheet of people who he was reaching out to in order to like raise some funding for the club and whatnot. ⁓ And he started using OrgOrg in our of new chat experience where you basically can create a Slack-like channel, but these things are powered by AI have kind of their own environment with them. So you can think of them as almost like, you know, they have an open claw associated with the environment. And so he just like uploaded the spreadsheet and it like, it has, ⁓ as were talking it has an app experience associated with it. it just from a spreadsheet, it generated a full on CRS. forum. It started to create a marketing campaign forum. ⁓ It's and like started doing outreach and like it gave it access to the email list like started emailing. It's like ⁓ these things just start to unlock. know, productivity on a way that is just like mind-blowingly big as soon as like one person can just like get all of this stuff up and running. And so that's what the horizon and that's what the future looks like. And that's what the most exciting thing that I've seen somebody use org-org for besides like, yes, there's the nuts and bolts of just like how do you run a company and we know how to do this. But we just like have had terrible software up to this point. So like, yes, we'll fix all of that, ⁓ but ⁓ the is super exciting.
Samantha Keya: That's really cool. really cool. The fact that it just created a marketing campaign ⁓ isn't-
Wayne Crosby: Right. Right. It went out and then like enriched the data and then like, you know, started to, and he's already raised something like $50,000 from this thing. It was like to the drones and firefighting. It's like, ⁓ see. Let's see what happens.
Samantha Keya: ⁓ my goodness. incredible. So is there a strategy that you have for what to be different SaaS product but now is within your suite? Or is it kind like you hear ⁓ the most from people you end up
Wayne Crosby: So I think there's two things. think there's like, I've run a lot of teams for a lot of years and so I have a strong opinion about like the tooling that you need in order to run effective teams. And ⁓ a lot of the answers were known and we spent, you know, ⁓ majority of the first year just kind of building out ⁓ known, ⁓ okay, we definitely need all of this stuff together. And there's definitely another layer of ask customers are asking for things. We're continuing to iterate and add those things in to as they make sense. And then think that like, we're at the point where the suite is pretty, ⁓ robust. ⁓ we're okay, what's now? And ⁓ know, software industry is at this really interesting stage where I think there are no more moats in B2B software. so you have like think little bit more about like, okay, why do people want to use this? it the build versus buy equation has like. almost all build now, whereas it used to be ⁓ buy. And so from a strategic as a software company, I think you need to be looking at that and thinking through, okay, what is the value that I'm actually bringing? What expertise can I actually start to put into this software that's actually more valuable ⁓ than ⁓ the building of the software And so as we think through that, that's really where a lot of our strategy around kind of these new environments on how do you create and collaborate and actually run much bigger initiatives with much smaller teams than you've ever been able to do and make it easy and accessible for people. At the end of the day, I think that the... the average size of company that exists is gonna shrink dramatically. ⁓ course you're gonna have the big bohemness, but you're also gonna see them ⁓ their And it's gonna be harder for lots of people to go find ⁓ more work everybody's gonna be reducing workforce, unfortunately. And what that's gonna end up driving ⁓ is people are wait, I have this idea, I've had this idea for a long time. Let me go ahead and, it's easier than ever to build this stuff, let me go ahead and build it. But capital is always tricky, especially when you're getting started in order to get. And so you're going to have to deal with less. But the tooling helps augment that. And so you're going to just see over the next decade a kind of a Cambrian explosion of startups that come into existence. So it's like every different type that you could possibly imagine. And they're all going to be able to do really amazing things with a lot less. And they're going to stay smaller over the longer. historically you would see some of these like turn into giant companies as well. And so I think the future of work is are these small teams? And so as look at the strategy of, know, where are companies going and what are they doing? It's a lot of tooling around how can you just like ⁓ make the, you the 10 person unicorn, right? Because there's been a lot conversation in Silicon Valley around like the one person unicorn and like sure that's like a fun thought ⁓ exercise. But. that ignores my fundamental premise that work is human and we want to collaborate and we want to work. think the ideal size and I think most people have, hopefully most people have felt this at some point in their career, where they're on ⁓ like small ⁓ where get along with people, they have a shared goal and a shared vision ⁓ and like driving towards something that's meaningful. And then that usually starts to break down like once you get past 10-ish people in my experience, right? It's like, yeah. ⁓ I on Coin this term long ago in the early 90s around the two person, sorry, the two pizza team. it's this idea that like... ⁓ If you can feed an entire team with two pizzas, then like that's roughly the right size. Uh, and it turns out to be like eight to 10. Um, but if you have to like start ordering 20 pizzas in order to feed the team, that's no longer like, it doesn't feel very good. It feels like you're like getting bogged down with bureaucracy and other, and like you're spending too much time in communicating and coordinating as opposed to actually driving towards the goal that you want. Um, and I think there's something to that. Like there's a lot of things about Amazon culture that we can talk about that I don't necessarily agree with, but that one, I, a hundred agree with which is that the people like these smaller teams. want to feel like they have agency and ownership and right around 10 people I think is the sweet spot. So I think you're going to see like a ridiculous number of 10 person team spin-up.
Samantha Keya: recently launched a recording product. ⁓ What you to enter that space?
Wayne Crosby: Yes. ⁓ that's a good question. was a sort we had a bunch of companies that were using Loom and for communication and communication with the customers and they were tired of paying. you know, monthly bill to the loom. And so they said, Hey, ⁓ know, this feels like it's a part of ⁓ the communicating across the OrgOrg and like bringing people together and making sure that people were aligned both on our customer success teams and internally. Can build a spring recording feature for us that so we stop paying our loom fee? And so a month later we had a loom feature, right? Like it's ⁓ like the rate of software development is just insane. Right. And so, and it's baked with all of the
Samantha Keya: What? Wow.
Wayne Crosby: the permission controls and the security controls and the document management and stuff like that. So that's I think what people are looking for is they're just like, they feel like they need all of these things. But they don't want all of these individual solutions and they don't want all the bills and they know that software is getting cheaper and so they're kind of scratching their head going, why am I still paying, you know, 2015 fees when I'm, and even higher as these companies continue to raise rates, I know that it's actually just getting cheaper and cheaper to build this stuff.
Samantha Keya: So, okay, I have a little bit of an annoying question, I'm sorry. For teams already ⁓ tools like Loom, or maybe even just Loom, ⁓ makes OrgOrg's version a compelling replacement, if not a better replacement?
Wayne Crosby: Check out that. ⁓ a couple things there. the point for OrgOrg is like dirt cheap in comparison because we are able to operate on it with a small team that is able to produce this stuff. And so we're able to keep our cost structure down in a way that the old companies cannot. So, but beyond price, like a lot of companies, like whether or not they're paying for Loom or any of these other solutions or not, isn't really gonna be defining characteristic. And so then there's like a change management ⁓ piece that has to go into that and the cost associated change management. And so for those companies, say, ⁓ not only do we have all of the existing stuff and the earlier you get on this, as your company grows, the easier it is just to of like add in more of these products. ⁓ And all bundled underneath ⁓ one fee. So you're not paying any more depending on however much you're using. And we kind of address each stage of the company as you grow, you're going to need different types of tooling. And so we're kind of there with you as you grow. But also ⁓ like, operating as a modern, kind one of these modern 10 person AI driven companies where we're going to be able to iterate, we're going to be able to kind of push forward and you're not going to be stuck in the legacy of, you know, ⁓ what were solutions in the past? And we're kind of rethinking how do you actually build these AI first companies? ⁓
Samantha Keya: Yeah.
Wayne Crosby: the tool chain that you need in order to be able to do that. So if ⁓ looking for what your AI strategy is in the tool and it's what you're going to need in order to be able to bring your company forward, that's where we come in.
Samantha Keya: So what does a more streamlined internal workflow actually look like with org-org in place?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. So I just talking about some of the stuff where in the ideal world you have a collaborative space where people are working ⁓ go market or product or whatever it is. And then there's a shared agent where that's like helping facilitate the tasks that are with that. ⁓ so ⁓ humans are very in control. They're very much like trying to, ⁓ they see the vision, see the strategy, they're trying to push forward. And then Org Org is there to like, basically connect all of the dots in the power of what technology brings to the table to help make it easy for you. mean, we talked about like taking a spreadsheet and just turning it into a CRM and whatnot. Like that's what streamlined experiences look like. That's what people want ⁓ the end of the day is they exactly their solution. Like a spreadsheet is great. It's like very multipurpose. It does lots of things, but we talk about like the... level of customization and the exactness of like, just want this thing for my specific need. And that's never been able to be done before without like extreme cost. And so like just being able to get the details right for your specific need is really what starts to unlock a lot of that streamlined experience. ⁓
Samantha Keya: It's, that's hard to even imagine that that's even possible, but
Wayne Crosby: it down this way. sort of like, ⁓ imagine world ⁓ where have zero setting screens and zero admin screens, right? Like, you no longer have to like flip toggles or do anything. You just tell ⁓ the ⁓ what want and it turns into it. Like it morphs into the thing that you're actually needing. Right? And so there's no more like hard constraints around what it's more like, you know, it's more like molding and clay as opposed to, you know, concrete, right? And so you get close you get like 90 % of the thing that you want and then like if you want a little tweak here or there you just Tell it what you want and it like makes a small like minor adjustments in order to like suit your needs it's the time ⁓
Samantha Keya: So yeah, it sounds like I'm going to go and see I can on this. ⁓ So, ⁓ okay. You've said more on the way. ⁓ What can users expect from OrgOrg?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. Laughter Well, a lot of the cool stuff that I've been talking about is under development right now. It's a little bit raw. And so we have it released to a few beta testers. I expect in the over the summertime here in the next, know, ⁓ months or so, ⁓ going to be ⁓ out this in a more productionized experience. ⁓ And, know, if it's going to hopefully just like feel great on getting stuff done, it's going to feel effortless. You're to have ideas. You're going be able to turn them into action. You're going to be able to like drive change. So that's, that's the goal is like by summertime, we have like a pretty nice platform that people are all building on top of and, ⁓ and using internally order to able to get stuff done.
Samantha Keya: Very cool. do you see a future where companies rely on a single platform for all internal operations like org org?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ yes, I think that's possible. I think like a lot of this stuff is actually, I think one of the things that is going to be really interesting as it evolves is like, which models do you use for which things? And so while you may use a common platform in order to be able to get something done, I do think that, you know, there's going to be continued iteration on like which models are best for which tasks. If you're trying to do something with image generation, Nano Banana is the great model right now. but tomorrow it's not going to be. Or it is for some companies but not for others. so I think the interface that employees and people are using in order to get work done, we may be able to create a common platform for that. ⁓ think the models that are powering those underneath are going to be in flux for very long time. And need to allow for people to be able to choose which one actually suits their needs.
Samantha Keya: ⁓ can totally see that. So does success look like for OrgOrg
Wayne Crosby: Good question. that ⁓ in a fortunate enough position where I've had several successful startups. And so success for ⁓ looks a little bit different. I'll tell you that the moment I felt like I succeeded with G Suite Google Workspace was My son had nothing to with work. My son had started kindergarten at our local public school and I went to the first orientation day the principal stands up on stage and says, She didn't know I was in the audience, obviously, but she said, we're switching to Google Workspace this year. We ran an experiment last year where we tried it and the kids liked it better, the teachers liked it better, the collaboration was better, and the output that the kids generated was better. And so we're just switching this year. And I was like, whoa, I totally changed the way my kids are going to experience school. Right? And...
Samantha Keya: Wow.
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ And so I kind of hope on like a similar, I've got an 18 year old now. He's just got accepted to college and accepted. So he's going to be heading off next year. And so I'm hoping in the next four years, I can build a platform that a similar thing happens when he enters into the workforce. And he's like, you know, this is, you have completely changed the way that I work and the way that I'm experiencing work. And that's what success looks like for me, if I can pull it off. That's a big, ⁓ tall but I think we can get there.
Samantha Keya: A tall order, but a very noble one. think that's really sweet. congrats to your son.
Wayne Crosby: thanks.
Samantha Keya: Okay, well, I mean, that's all I have for today. Is there anything that I missed that you still want to speak on?
Wayne Crosby: That's it. It was awesome talking to you and I had a great time.
Samantha Keya: Yeah, me too. I had an awesome, like really wonderful time. Wayne, this was such a great conversation. Org is tackling a problem company feels too many tools, too much fragmentation ⁓ and rethinking what it looks like run an organization with a truly unified system. I'm excited to see how this platform continues to grow. ⁓ I'm, I'm going to play around it. ⁓ You have me really excited for
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. Yes. OK. Good. I will, yeah, if anybody's interested in the new tooling and wants to try some of this stuff out, just hit me up directly. I'm just Wayne at orgwork.com. And I'm happy to unlock some of the features for beta users and whatnot. like ⁓ we, ⁓ manage of our own customer success at this point and it's been super fun and we've been able to scale that. And so hit me up.
Samantha Keya: Okay, you heard it here first. To everyone listening, we'll be back soon with more founders, more products and more behind the scenes conversations. Thanks for tuning in.
Wayne Crosby: Alright. Alright, thanks.
Wayne Crosby: I'm excited to be here. That was a great intro. Thank you so much.
Samantha Keya: Of course, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. So you've built companies across multiple eras of software. what stayed the same through building and what has changed?
Wayne Crosby: You Well, that's a great question because as you mentioned, I've been doing this for a long time. So I'm 25 years in the industry of building companies and it's been just incredible to see the change of what's happened. even when I, from the time that I started Orwar to the time that it is now, you know, when I started, was AI was just starting to come onto the scene and... I was still writing every line of code and maybe using it to help do a little bit of, ⁓ you know, help with challenging bugs may crop up. And fast forward to today and there's no more really writing software per se. You have to have like a systems understanding and be able to prompt the LLMs to move forward. But it's just been an incredible journey from, ⁓ know, ⁓ original kind of assembly level classes that I took in college all the way to being able to use natural language to build software to help people. And as you mentioned, you know, I think so that's like the biggest change is just like how you do it and where you get stuck. no longer get stuck in all of the, you know, we started Zenter we had these problems of, you know, how do you draw fonts on a webpage, right? Like this was a, this was an unsolved problem at the ⁓ And, and you you just don't, don't get stuck on any of these kind of technical details because there's enough knowledge and prior art out there that just like helps you kind of blow through them. That's been by far biggest change. The thing that stayed the same though ⁓ is, is really what drives me on OrgOrg which is I believe that software and ⁓ technology a role to play in ⁓ fulfilling basic human need of wanting to collaborate and work together. It's why started Zenter back in the day, because I got tired of emailing around PowerPoint presentations, and I just thought collaboration was a better ⁓ tool, and what people wanted. And I still believe that's true. I think that there's this fundamental human desire to to come together and work. build something that's bigger than what we could build by ourselves. That collaboration and that human element of software is still very much the same no matter what industry you go into. That's why I keep getting drawn back to this productivity space of just how do you help people find that enjoyment in working together.
Samantha Keya: after build tools used by ⁓ billions.
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. The last number I saw was about 3 billion users were on G Suite. So it's insane.
Samantha Keya: my goodness. That's many. Wow. Well, okay. So you achieved massive success there. So what made you want to go back to building from scratch?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ I've always been a builder. I love building from scratch. love the early stages of are just ⁓ most fun in my opinion, you know I've had big teams and small teams and ⁓ ⁓ ⁓ really enjoy kind of working in that creative space ⁓ Is this something that people want? Would this actually help figuring that out and doing that exploration through ambiguity and just exploration? And so when I left Google in 2016, was a kind of a crazy journey. I can just talk a little bit about that. When we first got started, Google bought us because they were looking at how can they expand beyond. search. so Chrome didn't exist, Android didn't exist, like none of these other things existed. Gmail had just come onto the scene and so they thought well maybe we can actually expand out and build a full productivity suite. But the world wasn't quite ready for it. And it took many, many, many years for it to gain adoption. And I remember early on just kind of looking at some of the numbers and being like, wow, you many years in the average number of documents in Google was still like one per user. And ⁓ took a long time to get the suite to the point where it was capable enough to be able to handle real world situations ⁓ and also ⁓ people's habits change enough to realize that collaboration really is this thing that helps you work better. And so it wasn't until about year seven that I was there that I was like, wow, this is actually going to go and this is really big and it's going to be bigger than anything. You know, it's bigger than Microsoft's Office suite and it's all, you know, all of these other things. And so that was really exciting. But by the time that it was there and I had done a bunch of other things at Google too, like my team was responsible for signing with Google if anybody's been using that ever. And I did a bunch of stuff on the machine. learning front in terms of the early AI elements have actually come to define what we're doing now with some ⁓ the on my team were the original authors of the transformer paper that kind of has ⁓ unlocked lot of the AI stuff that's today. So it was like an incredible journey and I loved every minute of it but by eight, nine years after had started it was a very different company ⁓ and ⁓ I had learned to navigate lot of bureaucracy. set my teams for success, but I wanted to get back to building. I felt like I could have a bigger impact in the world. I kind of ask myself this question every year. I do this to this day, which is... You know, time is precious and like, where can I have the biggest impact in the world? and for many, many years it was at Google because every time we launched anything, was, you it would hit millions users. and then I got to the point where it was like, actually, I think my biggest impact is going to be somewhere else. Let me go ahead and jump in to do another startup. and so at that time I had been working with the, the, the CHRO at name was Laszlo Baki. had written a New York Times bestseller in terms of like Google culture. And it had a Google had a huge halo around do people work? How do they use data ⁓ order to be able to influence the way that people work? And so he and I decided to off and go start another company called Humu, as you mentioned. ⁓ And that a really fun journey around, you know, the behavioral science and the behavioral economics of, you know, what is it that motivates us as people in a work How can we influence those things ⁓ so that
Samantha Keya: Mm-hmm.
Wayne Crosby: both the employee and the employer get the most out of that relationship. the ⁓ like science and psychology that ⁓ how people think and make decisions like fascinating to me. And ⁓ you know, we were at the point where technology was still coming on board with AI ⁓ and machine learning. And so, ⁓ maybe we can start to pick up some and ⁓ start to use a more data-driven approach to help work better. So did that for many years and that was really fun. then COVID hit and it got a lot harder. as it did for many companies during that time. we ended up deciding to sell the company to Perceptix, which is another great company. And I moved on to, I thought I was going to take a break, but my wife was like, know, there's no way you're going to be able to sit still. So I was like, okay, no, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the next month and I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to like sit here on the couch and I'm going to watch reruns of my favorite shows and like. That lasted about a week. And she's like, what were you doing up until 2 a.m. in the morning? I don't know. I was just like working on a project I had in mind, you know? And here we go again. So about that time, Michael Seichel from Y Combinator, who he and I had known each other from when I first did Y Combinator back in 2007, was entered.
Samantha Keya: I'm
Wayne Crosby: And he reached out and said, hey, saw you exited. Why don't you come be a partner at Y Combinator for a little bit and ⁓ partner and help out with next generation of founders. And ⁓ I that for a long time. And I really enjoyed it. But the funny thing that happened was after I had sold... a bunch of the employees, you know, they kind of a treated to other companies as happens after acquisition ⁓ they started reaching back out to me saying, Hey, what were those tools that we were using in who I want to bring to my new company? and I was like, well, those were just things that I built in nights and weekends and kind of inspired by. ⁓ the lessons that I've learned at Google and the tools that I've used at Google and kind of brought them to Humu and made them more for ⁓ companies. And said, hey, can you build me those? And I like, sure. know, let's just start building again on nights and weekends to help them out. And pretty quickly, we ended up with about 300 orgs on the platform. ⁓ and without even really trying. And I was like, oh, well, maybe there's something here again. And I talked to some of the folks over at Y Combinator and they're like, yeah, sure. Like, this makes perfect sense given your background and like, kind of, you know what the answers are here. You should give it a go again. And they convinced me to get started and jump back into the founder mode. So that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half or so.
Samantha Keya: Here we go again. awesome. So, I was going to ask you, like, what did you learn from your previous companies that directly shaved this one, but you just answered that.
Wayne Crosby: been this continuous journey of just trying to ⁓ look what problems are out there and are unsolved. And what skills I have that can bring to the table to help make the world a little bit better and make work a little bit better for people. And ⁓ just experimentation, right? And it's a lot of experimentation in the startup world. You almost never get it right on the first try. And so you have to kind of learn and grind and ⁓ grow each of your assumptions that you have that you believe are truths. But then you launch a product and ⁓ the tells you, actually, you don't understand my problem. And then got to learn from it. ⁓ grow and you got to reiterate, right? And I just love that process.
Samantha Keya: So where does this passion come from of making work better?
Wayne Crosby: That's a good question. If you had told me when I was in college that this was the space that I would end up in, I would have told you you're crazy. I would have been like, no, video games or entertainment. But as I went on in my career, found that I just was really drawn. There this moment in time at Google where I was managing a couple of teams. ⁓ And paper, they ⁓ amazing. employee ⁓ came from fantastic background and was able to write amazing code think really creatively individually. But this ⁓ one was just consistently outperforming performing this other team. I got really curious about like, why is that? Why is that actually happening? Because ⁓ they should be about equally. Like what else is going on besides just the skills and the tools that they're using, right? ⁓ There's like this other ⁓ more thing that's happening. And that's when I really started to get into like the behavioral science aspect of it and ⁓ the team and like how is it that like... people come together and sometimes they do amazing things and sometimes it's just kind of okay. And sometimes it's like it's a total disaster, right? Like something there that is unsolved and really interesting and there's more and more research that's going into it, but the psychology of it really got me interested in that. ⁓ And as I thought more deeply about it, ⁓ as kind of moved into, at one in time in my Google career, I joined the... this team called the Machine Intelligence team. was just getting started. early, like I mentioned, early days of AI. And I ran into this one researcher and I was like, oh, cool. What are you working on? And he's like, well, I'm working on like thinking about what a world in a post work environment looks like. And I was like, oh, interesting. Why are you doing that? Because like, clearly there's a lot to do. And he's like, well, AI is going to be successful. It's clear to me. And this was back in 2012. maybe even earlier, And I was just like, you are crazy. You are way out there, dude, but like you're in a research group. So, okay, fine. Go do your research. But as I thought about it more, I got really, had like this existential moment where it was like, do I really want to be a part of a team that potentially to a post-war world? I find lot of satisfaction in the work I do. I find a lot of fulfillment in like helping other people. And so what this actually mean? And I had a lot of conversations with this guy and he's super thoughtful. And I came to the conclusion that I think that work is fundamentally human, as I mentioned earlier. I think that we as human beings, we are social creatures, we like to come together, we like to collaborate and build together. And so I think that at the end of the day, we're gonna do this regardless of whether or not they're... I think the work is going to transform and change dramatically over the next decade. We're already starting to see it. But that fundamental desire to work together doesn't ever go away. And once I realized that it was intrinsic to being human, to want to work, and whatever shape that takes, that's when I got really interested in being like, OK, this is a space that I want to really play into and lean into. The productivity suite that I built for G Suite happened to be an opportunity that I saw. But then as I dug into it more, I was just like, yes, this is part of being human, and we should There's nothing more valuable than like helping bring that out and make it easier for people to experience
Samantha Keya: That's really cool.
Wayne Crosby: I know most people think of work as like this thing that they have to do and it kind of sucks. And I think that's true for a lot of people, but I think we've lost sight ever basically ever since, like just to get a little philosophical here for a second, ever since the industrial revolution, we've been like putting people in smaller and smaller boxes and say, this is your playground, right? And like, you become the expert of this thing. But I really think that that takes away from the humanness ⁓ what we actually want to do. And so ⁓ the first time ever, ⁓ in opinion, and certainly in my career, I feel like... We're expanding roles as opposed to like putting them into more and more expertise roles because you can have a smaller team now that has ⁓ know marketing expertise product expertise design expertise Sales expertise all ⁓ like enabled agents ⁓ and and you're able to get work done in a way that is so empowering and and feels amazing because you're you're not blocked by somebody else you're not being told If you're on a small team that where everybody has agency, you're not being told, you know You can't go explore this other place that might be interesting to you, right? No, you're a software engineer. You write code you don't you know been in some places that are like you don't even talk to the customers right and and I think that's it's just fascinating to me to see the world go through this transformation of like No, ⁓ with power of a lot of these agents and tools you can do a whole bunch more than what is young to defined inside of your box companies are seeing the value in that for the first time and think that's that's a real unlock for everybody.
Samantha Keya: Yeah. ⁓ So talked little bit about how ⁓ companies rely dozens of point solutions to their organizations. Why has software evolved way, do you think?
Wayne Crosby: Oh, that's an interesting one too. Because software has typically been hard to build. And so if you, if you like, I think. Well, certainly most engineers are familiar with a company called PagerDuty. It's a company that helps monitor your production systems and then automatically alerts engineers whenever there's issues or ⁓ it needs to be escalated to somebody to look at a production system, ⁓ can page them and sets up rotations. And this a company that ⁓ was, it out of Y Combinator back in ⁓ the 2008 nine or something like that. And at that moment in time, it was like really hard to build that like interacted with telephone systems ⁓ other things ⁓ and up schedules and like Google calendar didn't really like barely existed at that time too. Like there was like nothing in place in order to be able to support this. And it was really hard. And so they ended up building multi-billion dollar public company out of being able to just like connect these systems. make it easier for people to do these things. because it was hard, ⁓ basically had to stay roughly in their lane about this is the type of product that we build and offer. And continued over and and over until literally just a couple of years ago, where it was just impossible. ⁓ The amount resources, you were at Google or a Meta or one of these giant companies, the amount of resources you to build just a single product was staggering. so the advice that was given over and over from venture capital and startup advice was go narrow, go deep, be the best solution that you can possibly for this ⁓ individual point-wise solution that you're doing and that's how you're going to find success. ⁓ that's kind of how the market grew ⁓ it was a best of breeds kind of solution, you know, world where you would pick and choose the different tools that you wanted. And then all of a sudden AI came onto the scene and again like this the entire software industry has been built up with the premise that the most expensive part of doing software is the part of building. of a sudden, almost overnight, that was flipped on its head and that became one of the cheapest parts of the entire product buildings. Right? And it was just like the entire world got flipped upside down. And so all of these companies that had spent years and years building a very narrow thing, you know, they're just of in a tough spot because they either have to choose to completely change the way that they think and start to or they're going to get consumed by some company that's coming up that's building a bunch of these other more suite-like solutions. And so that's where ⁓ idea of where we're came from was like okay the opportunity is right between, and industries constantly go through kind of like bundling and unbundling phases, and it's very clear that we're in a strong bundling phase right now, but it's even different than ⁓ what seen in the past because Even in a bundled solution, a lot of times people would have to take a, you know, like an 80 % product, as opposed to getting the exact thing that they wanted. And, and now with AI, everybody's like, well, no, I want exactly the thing that I, that I'm looking for. Like 80 % is no longer good enough. And so not only are we in like this, this phase where we're bundling again, but we're also in this like hyper personalized, software stack that like, has to be tailored specifically to your needs. that's ⁓ a new and interesting challenge that's presenting to every company that's running right now.
Samantha Keya: So how do you tackle that at org-org where everybody wants something just slightly different?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah, well, it's part of that is the fact that we're able to build so much faster. And so when people are asking for particular things, we're able to accommodate them or the infrastructure. on the internet is really good now, so we're able to like spin up new things to be able to support them. And so it's ⁓ of this is ⁓ speed. In the past, most people had had to say no, and now we can say yes. ⁓ And that's been ⁓ I think other thing is that... And if we want to like look a little bit talked a lot about the past but we want to look forward a little bit in terms of like what this actually ⁓ like And not quite there yet, but but it seems clear to me And this is to like kind of, a confusing concept, but bear with me for a second. I think that ⁓ just entering ⁓ stage where a web application is becoming the default so what I was, ⁓ I'll tell this story I think it's fascinating ⁓ as a founder of slides and somebody who's ⁓ used slide software their career. ⁓ For the first time I was giving a presentation to another group and I was just like, man, like mucking with slides is so painful after working with, know, cloud code and building all this really cool stuff. was like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna build an app for my presentation. And it was so much better, so much faster. the, I was able to like create interactive elements, right? As part of a web application experience. And, and know, you just like tell it, it's like, cool. I want like a slide format and ⁓ here's, roughly the story that I want to lay out. And here's kind of the interactive elements I want. And it, it ⁓ built just a phenomenal presentation in a matter of minutes, as opposed to ⁓ trying muck around with stylistic elements or alignment or, you know, all of these other things that get in the way. ⁓ of actually communicating some idea. And so as we look forward, think applications are going to become the new document. And you're going to see basically as many applications come into the world as you see documents today, which is kind of like a weird concept. they're so dynamic and they're so expressive to be able to tell exactly the story that you want and so easy to create that I think that there's this really compelling journey. that we're on to be able to communicate better as people. And I think the old productivity suites are pretty broken at this point. it's gonna take a decade for people to get there, but it's absolutely gonna happen.
Samantha Keya: So do you think of org-org as a productivity suite or do you think of it like as an internal operating system? How do you classify it in your mind?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah, so we've trying talk through the different brainings of this. And one of the ones that I like is that is an organizational productivity suite. You have your employee productivity suite that is really ⁓ has been your docs, sheets and slides type of stuff. But there's a whole nother layer ⁓ of that you need ⁓ in to run an effective organization. And that's really where Orward comes in is to fill that gap of between the individual creating these artifacts ⁓ and the and that the organization. needs as a whole in order to be able to run effectively. And so it's things like you know really great employee profile pages and discovery of content and being able to ⁓ know share effectively ⁓ and create you know set these goals in a way that ⁓ are to understand and maintain as opposed to just being like put into a document and never looked at again. There's a bunch of stuff that you just kind of need to support organizations that historically has been pretty bad.
Samantha Keya: So what's the most interesting way you've seen someone use org-org?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ that's a good question. So I'd say that like we have, there's a of the tooling that we have in place has not been ⁓ rocket science. It's you know, existing kind of these SaaS companies that, ⁓ or ⁓ a of that have used point-wise solutions before. ⁓ And then they're basically adopting our solution because it's. as good and cheaper and everything else. So they're like on that front, there hasn't been a ton of innovation. It's the story is really around bundling. and they just like start with one tool and then they add another. and kind of build up from there. But what we're working on right now, and this is a little bit of a precursor, but I just saw a demo from one of our interns yesterday and I was like, yes, that is it. That is what we're trying to do. He basically just had a spreadsheet of, he runs a club at UC Davis and it's a club that builds drones to help firefighters in California. It's like a very noble and cool club. And he had a spreadsheet of people who he was reaching out to in order to like raise some funding for the club and whatnot. ⁓ And he started using OrgOrg in our of new chat experience where you basically can create a Slack-like channel, but these things are powered by AI have kind of their own environment with them. So you can think of them as almost like, you know, they have an open claw associated with the environment. And so he just like uploaded the spreadsheet and it like, it has, ⁓ as were talking it has an app experience associated with it. it just from a spreadsheet, it generated a full on CRS. forum. It started to create a marketing campaign forum. ⁓ It's and like started doing outreach and like it gave it access to the email list like started emailing. It's like ⁓ these things just start to unlock. know, productivity on a way that is just like mind-blowingly big as soon as like one person can just like get all of this stuff up and running. And so that's what the horizon and that's what the future looks like. And that's what the most exciting thing that I've seen somebody use org-org for besides like, yes, there's the nuts and bolts of just like how do you run a company and we know how to do this. But we just like have had terrible software up to this point. So like, yes, we'll fix all of that, ⁓ but ⁓ the is super exciting.
Samantha Keya: That's really cool. really cool. The fact that it just created a marketing campaign ⁓ isn't-
Wayne Crosby: Right. Right. It went out and then like enriched the data and then like, you know, started to, and he's already raised something like $50,000 from this thing. It was like to the drones and firefighting. It's like, ⁓ see. Let's see what happens.
Samantha Keya: ⁓ my goodness. incredible. So is there a strategy that you have for what to be different SaaS product but now is within your suite? Or is it kind like you hear ⁓ the most from people you end up
Wayne Crosby: So I think there's two things. think there's like, I've run a lot of teams for a lot of years and so I have a strong opinion about like the tooling that you need in order to run effective teams. And ⁓ a lot of the answers were known and we spent, you know, ⁓ majority of the first year just kind of building out ⁓ known, ⁓ okay, we definitely need all of this stuff together. And there's definitely another layer of ask customers are asking for things. We're continuing to iterate and add those things in to as they make sense. And then think that like, we're at the point where the suite is pretty, ⁓ robust. ⁓ we're okay, what's now? And ⁓ know, software industry is at this really interesting stage where I think there are no more moats in B2B software. so you have like think little bit more about like, okay, why do people want to use this? it the build versus buy equation has like. almost all build now, whereas it used to be ⁓ buy. And so from a strategic as a software company, I think you need to be looking at that and thinking through, okay, what is the value that I'm actually bringing? What expertise can I actually start to put into this software that's actually more valuable ⁓ than ⁓ the building of the software And so as we think through that, that's really where a lot of our strategy around kind of these new environments on how do you create and collaborate and actually run much bigger initiatives with much smaller teams than you've ever been able to do and make it easy and accessible for people. At the end of the day, I think that the... the average size of company that exists is gonna shrink dramatically. ⁓ course you're gonna have the big bohemness, but you're also gonna see them ⁓ their And it's gonna be harder for lots of people to go find ⁓ more work everybody's gonna be reducing workforce, unfortunately. And what that's gonna end up driving ⁓ is people are wait, I have this idea, I've had this idea for a long time. Let me go ahead and, it's easier than ever to build this stuff, let me go ahead and build it. But capital is always tricky, especially when you're getting started in order to get. And so you're going to have to deal with less. But the tooling helps augment that. And so you're going to just see over the next decade a kind of a Cambrian explosion of startups that come into existence. So it's like every different type that you could possibly imagine. And they're all going to be able to do really amazing things with a lot less. And they're going to stay smaller over the longer. historically you would see some of these like turn into giant companies as well. And so I think the future of work is are these small teams? And so as look at the strategy of, know, where are companies going and what are they doing? It's a lot of tooling around how can you just like ⁓ make the, you the 10 person unicorn, right? Because there's been a lot conversation in Silicon Valley around like the one person unicorn and like sure that's like a fun thought ⁓ exercise. But. that ignores my fundamental premise that work is human and we want to collaborate and we want to work. think the ideal size and I think most people have, hopefully most people have felt this at some point in their career, where they're on ⁓ like small ⁓ where get along with people, they have a shared goal and a shared vision ⁓ and like driving towards something that's meaningful. And then that usually starts to break down like once you get past 10-ish people in my experience, right? It's like, yeah. ⁓ I on Coin this term long ago in the early 90s around the two person, sorry, the two pizza team. it's this idea that like... ⁓ If you can feed an entire team with two pizzas, then like that's roughly the right size. Uh, and it turns out to be like eight to 10. Um, but if you have to like start ordering 20 pizzas in order to feed the team, that's no longer like, it doesn't feel very good. It feels like you're like getting bogged down with bureaucracy and other, and like you're spending too much time in communicating and coordinating as opposed to actually driving towards the goal that you want. Um, and I think there's something to that. Like there's a lot of things about Amazon culture that we can talk about that I don't necessarily agree with, but that one, I, a hundred agree with which is that the people like these smaller teams. want to feel like they have agency and ownership and right around 10 people I think is the sweet spot. So I think you're going to see like a ridiculous number of 10 person team spin-up.
Samantha Keya: recently launched a recording product. ⁓ What you to enter that space?
Wayne Crosby: Yes. ⁓ that's a good question. was a sort we had a bunch of companies that were using Loom and for communication and communication with the customers and they were tired of paying. you know, monthly bill to the loom. And so they said, Hey, ⁓ know, this feels like it's a part of ⁓ the communicating across the OrgOrg and like bringing people together and making sure that people were aligned both on our customer success teams and internally. Can build a spring recording feature for us that so we stop paying our loom fee? And so a month later we had a loom feature, right? Like it's ⁓ like the rate of software development is just insane. Right. And so, and it's baked with all of the
Samantha Keya: What? Wow.
Wayne Crosby: the permission controls and the security controls and the document management and stuff like that. So that's I think what people are looking for is they're just like, they feel like they need all of these things. But they don't want all of these individual solutions and they don't want all the bills and they know that software is getting cheaper and so they're kind of scratching their head going, why am I still paying, you know, 2015 fees when I'm, and even higher as these companies continue to raise rates, I know that it's actually just getting cheaper and cheaper to build this stuff.
Samantha Keya: So, okay, I have a little bit of an annoying question, I'm sorry. For teams already ⁓ tools like Loom, or maybe even just Loom, ⁓ makes OrgOrg's version a compelling replacement, if not a better replacement?
Wayne Crosby: Check out that. ⁓ a couple things there. the point for OrgOrg is like dirt cheap in comparison because we are able to operate on it with a small team that is able to produce this stuff. And so we're able to keep our cost structure down in a way that the old companies cannot. So, but beyond price, like a lot of companies, like whether or not they're paying for Loom or any of these other solutions or not, isn't really gonna be defining characteristic. And so then there's like a change management ⁓ piece that has to go into that and the cost associated change management. And so for those companies, say, ⁓ not only do we have all of the existing stuff and the earlier you get on this, as your company grows, the easier it is just to of like add in more of these products. ⁓ And all bundled underneath ⁓ one fee. So you're not paying any more depending on however much you're using. And we kind of address each stage of the company as you grow, you're going to need different types of tooling. And so we're kind of there with you as you grow. But also ⁓ like, operating as a modern, kind one of these modern 10 person AI driven companies where we're going to be able to iterate, we're going to be able to kind of push forward and you're not going to be stuck in the legacy of, you know, ⁓ what were solutions in the past? And we're kind of rethinking how do you actually build these AI first companies? ⁓
Samantha Keya: Yeah.
Wayne Crosby: the tool chain that you need in order to be able to do that. So if ⁓ looking for what your AI strategy is in the tool and it's what you're going to need in order to be able to bring your company forward, that's where we come in.
Samantha Keya: So what does a more streamlined internal workflow actually look like with org-org in place?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. So I just talking about some of the stuff where in the ideal world you have a collaborative space where people are working ⁓ go market or product or whatever it is. And then there's a shared agent where that's like helping facilitate the tasks that are with that. ⁓ so ⁓ humans are very in control. They're very much like trying to, ⁓ they see the vision, see the strategy, they're trying to push forward. And then Org Org is there to like, basically connect all of the dots in the power of what technology brings to the table to help make it easy for you. mean, we talked about like taking a spreadsheet and just turning it into a CRM and whatnot. Like that's what streamlined experiences look like. That's what people want ⁓ the end of the day is they exactly their solution. Like a spreadsheet is great. It's like very multipurpose. It does lots of things, but we talk about like the... level of customization and the exactness of like, just want this thing for my specific need. And that's never been able to be done before without like extreme cost. And so like just being able to get the details right for your specific need is really what starts to unlock a lot of that streamlined experience. ⁓
Samantha Keya: It's, that's hard to even imagine that that's even possible, but
Wayne Crosby: it down this way. sort of like, ⁓ imagine world ⁓ where have zero setting screens and zero admin screens, right? Like, you no longer have to like flip toggles or do anything. You just tell ⁓ the ⁓ what want and it turns into it. Like it morphs into the thing that you're actually needing. Right? And so there's no more like hard constraints around what it's more like, you know, it's more like molding and clay as opposed to, you know, concrete, right? And so you get close you get like 90 % of the thing that you want and then like if you want a little tweak here or there you just Tell it what you want and it like makes a small like minor adjustments in order to like suit your needs it's the time ⁓
Samantha Keya: So yeah, it sounds like I'm going to go and see I can on this. ⁓ So, ⁓ okay. You've said more on the way. ⁓ What can users expect from OrgOrg?
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. Laughter Well, a lot of the cool stuff that I've been talking about is under development right now. It's a little bit raw. And so we have it released to a few beta testers. I expect in the over the summertime here in the next, know, ⁓ months or so, ⁓ going to be ⁓ out this in a more productionized experience. ⁓ And, know, if it's going to hopefully just like feel great on getting stuff done, it's going to feel effortless. You're to have ideas. You're going be able to turn them into action. You're going to be able to like drive change. So that's, that's the goal is like by summertime, we have like a pretty nice platform that people are all building on top of and, ⁓ and using internally order to able to get stuff done.
Samantha Keya: Very cool. do you see a future where companies rely on a single platform for all internal operations like org org?
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ yes, I think that's possible. I think like a lot of this stuff is actually, I think one of the things that is going to be really interesting as it evolves is like, which models do you use for which things? And so while you may use a common platform in order to be able to get something done, I do think that, you know, there's going to be continued iteration on like which models are best for which tasks. If you're trying to do something with image generation, Nano Banana is the great model right now. but tomorrow it's not going to be. Or it is for some companies but not for others. so I think the interface that employees and people are using in order to get work done, we may be able to create a common platform for that. ⁓ think the models that are powering those underneath are going to be in flux for very long time. And need to allow for people to be able to choose which one actually suits their needs.
Samantha Keya: ⁓ can totally see that. So does success look like for OrgOrg
Wayne Crosby: Good question. that ⁓ in a fortunate enough position where I've had several successful startups. And so success for ⁓ looks a little bit different. I'll tell you that the moment I felt like I succeeded with G Suite Google Workspace was My son had nothing to with work. My son had started kindergarten at our local public school and I went to the first orientation day the principal stands up on stage and says, She didn't know I was in the audience, obviously, but she said, we're switching to Google Workspace this year. We ran an experiment last year where we tried it and the kids liked it better, the teachers liked it better, the collaboration was better, and the output that the kids generated was better. And so we're just switching this year. And I was like, whoa, I totally changed the way my kids are going to experience school. Right? And...
Samantha Keya: Wow.
Wayne Crosby: ⁓ And so I kind of hope on like a similar, I've got an 18 year old now. He's just got accepted to college and accepted. So he's going to be heading off next year. And so I'm hoping in the next four years, I can build a platform that a similar thing happens when he enters into the workforce. And he's like, you know, this is, you have completely changed the way that I work and the way that I'm experiencing work. And that's what success looks like for me, if I can pull it off. That's a big, ⁓ tall but I think we can get there.
Samantha Keya: A tall order, but a very noble one. think that's really sweet. congrats to your son.
Wayne Crosby: thanks.
Samantha Keya: Okay, well, I mean, that's all I have for today. Is there anything that I missed that you still want to speak on?
Wayne Crosby: That's it. It was awesome talking to you and I had a great time.
Samantha Keya: Yeah, me too. I had an awesome, like really wonderful time. Wayne, this was such a great conversation. Org is tackling a problem company feels too many tools, too much fragmentation ⁓ and rethinking what it looks like run an organization with a truly unified system. I'm excited to see how this platform continues to grow. ⁓ I'm, I'm going to play around it. ⁓ You have me really excited for
Wayne Crosby: Yeah. Yes. OK. Good. I will, yeah, if anybody's interested in the new tooling and wants to try some of this stuff out, just hit me up directly. I'm just Wayne at orgwork.com. And I'm happy to unlock some of the features for beta users and whatnot. like ⁓ we, ⁓ manage of our own customer success at this point and it's been super fun and we've been able to scale that. And so hit me up.
Samantha Keya: Okay, you heard it here first. To everyone listening, we'll be back soon with more founders, more products and more behind the scenes conversations. Thanks for tuning in.
Wayne Crosby: Alright. Alright, thanks.
