Blend Founder Nima Ghamsari on Customer ROI, Culture, and Vertical Software

So what are the one thing that you learned at Palantir that you brought it when you started the company? One value or one strategy that you learned that said, hey, that is a very good thing I learned and that helped you build the blend?

Kind of goes back to what I said about what makes Palantir really special is they do focus on the outcome, the ROI for the customer.

And one thing that most, like I said, most tech companies don't do this.

They're focused on their technology and their product and maybe their sales of the product, but not the end outcome.

Like even most companies that, you know, they do care about sales.

They care about getting the sale done.

And then they're like, okay, we got to go get another customer now.

So let's go make another sale.

But Palantir did teach me to work backwards and really drive ROI for the customer as a primary mechanism.

And that happens to be I was lucky enough to meet this guy, Peter Gassner, early on in the Blend lifecycle.

And he's the CEO of Viva, which is a huge vertical software company now.

They were much smaller back then in 2012.

And I was asking him, I was like, what do you think makes Viva special? What do you think about vertical software? There aren't a lot of vertical software companies that have been built in the last 20 years.

Why is that? And he was like, one, it's just super hard to build vertical software because everything's so nuanced and so detailed and so integrated.

But he said, two, the best vertical software companies put most of their attention on customer success and customer ROI.

And he said, he's like, no matter how focused you are on your customers, it's never wrong.

Like the more focused you are, it may seem almost irrational, but that was the same lesson from Palantir.

Like be super focused on your customer that Palantir had in mind.

And we took the same ethos to blend.

And, you know, actually one thing, you know, we announced our earnings yesterday.

And the thing I'm most proud of this year, we have like a few hundred customers that are financial institutions, some of them the biggest in the country.

And we have effectively, I shouldn't even say effectively, we have zero churn notices from those customers this year.

Most of them, good vertical software companies might have 97% gross retention, really good ones.

Good horizontal might have low 90s or mid 90s if they're really good.

But, you know, you kind of expect small customers to churn or maybe want to have one or two churn.