In this episode, Avanish and Umesh discuss:
- Uniphore's founding story in 2008 and evolution from conversational AI applications to an end-to-end Business AI Cloud platform serving 2,000+ customers including Fortune 500 enterprises
- The pivotal moment when two of Uniphore's largest customers (10% of revenue) warned their contracts might expire unless Uniphore opened up their platform for customer-built AI agents
- How platform necessity emerged from scale—running out of data scientists to manually fine-tune models for each customer led to building automated platform tooling
- The "open-heart surgery" transformation: shifting from selling business outcomes to line-of-business buyers to serving CIOs and developers, requiring wholesale DNA changes across engineering, product, sales, and marketing
- Why platform and ecosystem strategies are inseparable: "A platform is really not a platform until other people are building things on it"
- The M&A strategy for platform companies: narrower aperture requiring 100% architectural alignment, but instant unlocks when acquisitions fit the single-codebase platform architecture
- Three frameworks for platform success: maintain paranoia about whether you're a feature/product/company, surround yourself with "system thinkers," and stay intensely close to customers
- The "five-by-five" metric for measuring platform adoption: five large enterprises and five GSIs using the platform as their weekly "factory" for fine-tuning models and building agents, requiring simplified user experience for non-technical business users
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early to mid-stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Umesh
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and Co-founder of Uniphore, one of the largest AI-native, multimodal enterprise-class SaaS companies in the world. Sparked by his vision and focus to use AI technology to bridge the gap between humans and machines, today Umesh is recognized as an enterprise AI pioneer, bringing knowledge AI, generative AI and emotion AI into a single platform, allowing customers to harness AI’s powerful capabilities across voice, video and text-based applications. Known for his grit as a leader, his passion for customers and his deep understanding of technology, he is called upon to guide some of the world’s largest brands through their digital transformation. Umesh’s strong portfolio of patents serves as a testament to his innovative thinking and commitment to advancing AI technology.
As an international business leader, Umesh has been recognized with many awards including ‘40 under 40’ Bright Young Business Leaders in the Economic Times, ‘Next Generation Leader’ by Time Magazine, and previously, as an ‘Innovator Under 35’ by MIT Tech Review. Umesh is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and an accomplished speaker and highly sought-after presenter.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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