Gainsight

So it's definitely- Keep being human, basically.

And I have an interesting fact here, Emilia, for you and for everyone who, who are listening, which is, uh, a Gainsight report or the Gainsight 2025 Customer Success Index.

It was published in January 2026, and it found that more than 50% of companies are now integrating AI into their core CS workflows.

And AI, yeah, I know we're bringing this AI again.

And then customer data took us to reverse ETL.

We found that getting CSMs and AEs to do their work in some new platform is unfeasible, but putting better data in Salesforce and better data in Gainsight is actually extremely valuable.

Because the salespeople and the CSMs already live in Salesforce and Gainsight, respectively.

And better, richer data in those tools would just transform what value they can provide their customers.

So that was reverse ETL.

And it was just one of those lucky moments in my career.

The person that asked me is now the CEO of Gainsight.

His name's Chuck Ganapathy.

And he's still a mentor to this day.

So if you think about Salesforce, they defined, they're the first kind of cloud software company or major cloud software company making a bet that that was going to be a big thing.

And their bet has definitely paid off, but Box and Gainsight were also category creators in content creation and customer success.

And I saw an opportunity here to create a new category with hybrid work.

The situation with offices, they're very different than they were in 2019.

And the more they push SOC 2, the more Vanta benefits, right? Customer success is another good version of this.

Nick Mehta from Gainsight like really pushed the idea of customer success as a category, and then they became the customer success company, right? Salesforce is interesting.

CRMs existed, but the big innovation was actually SaaS.

So they were pushing a bigger idea, which is not even CRM because CRM already existed.

However, I've had some really interesting experiences in customer education.

One of them I recall from was Nick Madda when he was at Gainsight.

I came in and did this report where I've been similar to you.

I've been in consulting, I've been in high-tech, I've been a developer, I've done all these different things.

Oh, well, like I've had this recently.

This person wants, this doesn't, doesn't work for a company they're trying to learn.

One of my favorite stories ever was there was this young person in college, I was at Gainsight at the time, they reached out to me, found me, and asked me this really nice email.

And it was, hey, Mr. Darrington, you know, I'm blah, blah, blah, I'm going to this university, and I really want to learn this because I want to get a job in this field.

I used to love hearing Nick Mehta.

the ex-Gainsight CEO and his podcasts or appearances, he had a very high profile and he's, I like to hear, and he had very interesting perspectives.

Christy Faltruso, Bob London, they're colleagues of mine, people that I know that they very much advocate For customer success from different perspective, Chrissy is very loud and direct and I like it.

Bob came up with chief listening officer and how to ask the right questions and the line of questions.

Nick's a charter member of Team Human, who is equal parts philosopher, economist, mathematician, technologist, and entrepreneur.

Oh, and by the way, he's a serial CEO who most recently was at the helm of Gainsight.

Nick almost single-handedly created the billion-dollar enterprise software segment we call Customer Success.

He did it all while making silly YouTube videos.

So I believe the answers to whatever questions you ask me are not found anywhere, so we don't know the answer there.

Number two, definitely did not single-handedly create the CS category.

My God, there's so many people, both within Gainsight and outside customers, competitors, they all made that happen.

Number three, I need to find some better ways fashion role models to be compared to on your, on your list here.