Ep. 280 - Jennifer Smith, Cofounder of Scribe on Building Software to Create Operating Systems of Knowhow

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we host Jennifer Smith, CEO and Cofounder of Scribe. Jennifer and I talk about her journey as an accidental entrepreneur and the trends and opportunity she sees as she grows a software company on a mission to build the first operating system of know-how. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript of Jennifer Smith, CEO & Co-founder of Scribe

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jennifer Smith. She is the CEO and co-founder of Scribe. Which is a startup software company that enables you to automatically generate step-by-step guides for any process or task. Welcome to the show, Jennifer,

Jennifer Smith: Pleasure to be here Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to talk to you. Not only because what you're building. But you've got a pretty interesting background that I think our audience will get into. My understanding is you got into entrepreneurship as a, an accidental entrepreneur. You've spent some time at McKinsey and at Greylock. Degrees from Harvard and Princeton. And now you're developing and building a startup from scratch. So why don't we tell the audience about how you got on your path to becoming an entrepreneur. 

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I, I do say I'm a bit of an accidental entrepreneur, cause I, you know, meet so many folks in the valley who say, I knew since the age of 10 that I was going to found a company. And you know, if you had asked me even a few years ago before I started Scribe, I would have said no, unlikely not. 

To me I fell in love with a problem. So, I'll kind of take you on a quick history tour. Imagine it's 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you're a leading global corporation and you want to figure out how work is getting done. Maybe you're facing a productivity imperative or you're scaling up your company. And so what do you do?

You probably hire some fancy consultants, right? And they probably come around. And they interview your people. And they create a bunch of PowerPoints. Maybe they document what some of your best practices are like. Anyone who has seen office space can maybe just think of the Bob. And, you know, I should know, I spent seven years at McKinsey. Doing exactly that. 

I did mostly work in our Oregon operations practice. Which functionally meant spending about eight hours a day in an operation center, looking over the shoulder of agents, trying to figure out how they were doing things. And I learned really quickly the name of the game, at least as a consultant at the time was you figured out who the best person that ops center was. You sat next to them. And you said, what are you doing differently Judy. 

And Judy would tell you. Right? Oh, I was trained to do this. And you know, she'd pull out a big manual. I'll date myself. It was a big binder at the time. Right. Here's what I was trained to do. But, you know, I found these 30 shortcuts. And here's what I do. And I would write that down and my team would sell that back to our clients for a whole bunch of money.

I always thought like, gosh, if the Judy's of the world had just had a way to share what they know how to do, they could have had really big impact on that ops center. Right. They didn't need me and my team to be saying it for them. And so that always kind of nagged at me, but I figured that was a problem for someone else to solve someday.

And then fast forward a decade later, and I'm working at Greylock on Sand Hill Road. And I spent a lot of my time there meeting with CXOs of large enterprises. So CIO, CDOs, Chief Innovation Officers. A lot of folks who would kind of come talk to VCs to try to understand how they could be more innovative.

I counted them when I left actually. I talked to over 1200 folks. So pretty broad sample. And what I realized was nothing had changed. The way that you still wanted to understand how work was getting out. You were still getting some version of a 28-year-old Jennifer with a Lenovo ThinkPad running around, interviewing your people, right?

Maybe it was an internal person and maybe now you're using a fancy Wiki instead of PowerPoint to capture it. But the idea is still the same. It was still very manual, not very scalable. And that was crazy to me. We'd had so much technological innovation and something that's so core. So fundamental to the way that millions of people, billions of people around the world work, hadn't changed. And so, I just got really obsessed with this problem and Scribe was born. 

Brian Ardinger: So that's the impotence of the problem. It's like, okay, well, I've got this little nugget and ideas are great, but obviously you have to execute on that idea to make it an innovation or make something of value from that. How did you go from that nugget of information to finding a team or finding somebody who could help build or solve this problem for you?

Jennifer Smith: I believe in fast iteration around this. And so what we said was let's try to build the most basic MVP of a company and a product around this idea. And our idea was what if we could watch an expert do work and automatically capture what they know how to do? What if it was just like documentation as digital exhaust? Just a by-product of you doing your normal job.

And so, we built what was the very beginnings of Scribe. Wasn't even called Scribe at the time. And what we were focused on was just getting something very basic out there. That was for free. That people could test and use. And we could learn from that. And so, we kept the company very lean. Maybe a topic for another conversation. But I believe in running very, very lean as a team. Probably painfully so.

Until you really feel like the market is pulling something out of you. And so, we put our software out in the world. And sort of said, like, let's see how people use this. And what they tell us. And Scribe picked up some legs after a bunch of iterations and grew. And now it's being used by tens of thousands of workers around the world.

And that's because we really focused on a type of software that the end user would want. I think a lot of enterprise software today is focused towards a buyer. It's something that your boss tells you to use. And that's why you use it. And we said, let's flip this on its head. Let's try to iterate our way to a product that someone uses because they want to, not because their boss is telling them to. But because it makes their day easier, they're more productive. They get recognized for their contributions. 

Brian Ardinger: It's an interesting approach because we've seen a couple of different companies that have taken that B2B approach and flipped it on its head. Like a Slack where, you know, again, it's a product team or something that starts to engage and use the product. And then through that word of mouth and through iterations, they start getting to the point where the ...