Leading an AI-powered Turnaround with Avi Kedmi, CEO of SysAid

Dan Balcauski sits down with Avi Kedmi, CEO of SysAid, to explore Avi's remarkable journey from a Java developer to a seasoned tech leader. Avi shares insights on driving a 22-year-old company through AI-driven transformation while maintaining growth and profitability. The discussion delves into the importance of a clear vision and mission, the strategic return of SysAid's founder, and the critical role of product excellence in scaling a B2B SaaS company. Avi also provides his perspective on the current AI landscape and its transformative potential, drawing from his extensive experience in machine learning. Tune in to discover invaluable tips for scaling success and the future of AI in IT service management.

00:55 Avi Kedmi's Journey in Tech
03:36 SysAid's Elevator Pitch
04:43 Joining SysAid and Initial Challenges
09:49 The Importance of Product in B2B SaaS
11:39 Mission and Vision: Driving Change
19:09 Bringing the Founder Back
22:35 The Power of OKRs and Feedback
22:50 Impact of Strategic Decisions
23:47 Accelerating Innovation and Execution
24:08 Balancing Innovation and Profitability
27:56 AI's Role in Business Transformation
36:10 Monetizing AI Capabilities
39:01 Personal Influences and CEO Insights

Guest Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/avikedmi/
https://www.sysaid.com/

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:20

Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS Companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Avi Kedmi, CEO of SysAid. Avi's journey in tech is fascinating from founding and selling his machine learning startup to spending a decade in executive leadership at LivePerson, where you help transform it into a global leader in digital customer engagement. Now at SysAid, he's leading a 22-year-old company through an AI driven transformation while maintaining double digit growth and profitability. Let's dive in. Welcome Avi to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

Avi Kedmi: 0:52

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Dan Balcauski: 0:55

I am very excited for our conversation today, Avi, I gave you the folks a little bit of a taste of your background in my intro, but could you kinda briefly introduce yourself and tell us a little about your journey in the SaaS world.

Avi Kedmi: 1:07

Yep. Sure. I think I started my journey in. 90, 98, something like that. And through this journey I started as a developer, a Java developer in the early days of the, before the first bubble. And grew from there to, to build myself to be a product leader. Founder. And later on an executive in a, in, it's more a Nasdaq company. I feel like I've done a lot. I dunno if it's good or bad, but from development to product, to customer success, to support sales like really different things. So happy to be here. I also have a family and four kids. And it's a journey on its own. I say.

Dan Balcauski: 1:55

You are a very busy man and we appreciate you taking time outta your schedule to spend it with us and share your hard one knowledge. Look, we all have these moments in our lives that kind of transform us. I kind of think of him as your superhero transformation moment where I'm a regular, normal, high school student. As Peter Parker. I get bitten by a rad, radioactive spider. I go to bed. I wake up, up Spider-Man. What moment has that been for you in your life?

Avi Kedmi: 2:22

I, I think the, for me it was early in the days, that moment where you write code and you see that creation and that moment that you see that creation and your power to create. And because it's a machine, eventually you are generating a product that's like it's code that you can run. It some sort of always does what you programmed it to do almost forever, right? So it's a combination of that moment of creation, it's like birth and at the same time it's a birth of something that is so resilient, right? So I think that was the moment I fell in love with building, with just building products.

Dan Balcauski: 3:08

Well, I'm glad you had that experience. I also started my career as a software developer, and mostly what I remember is all the moments where the machine wouldn't do what I wanted to do and didn't care how angry I got. So I realized that maybe a lifelong of engineering wasn't a. My future and switch to other more productive paths. That's awesome. I and hopefully, these machines continue to do what we tell them and don't take over. But I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords and wants to make sure that they, they're feel welcome from at least my end of the microphone. I wanna pivot a little bit to SysAid and cha and Scaling that company to set the context for everyone. Can you give us just. Your 32nd elevator pitch on what SysAid is where it plays.

Avi Kedmi: 3:47

SysAid is a service management. Software vendor that provides an out of the box software that is focused on mid-market organizations. And it's a global, it has a global footprint. So we have about 3000 clients. We sell across more than a hundred countries and the majority of the use cases are run it. So if you are in. Any company in the world, and you use our software, it means that you have VPN issues or you want a new computer or you broke your computer, or you're trying to get access to Salesforce and you needed someone to provision a license. So a lot of it trickles back to it. And that's our software that provides all the help desk, the ticketing aspects of it, and also all the automations, workflows and lately also a lot of ai.

Dan Balcauski: 4:42

Well that's fascinating. And I know that you weren't the original founder at SysAid. Can you just kind of give us the short story of how you ended up at the company And what was the main challenge that you were brought on to help solve when you joined?

Avi Kedmi: 4:56

Yep. So it's interesting. I actually was as I was winding down from life person as an executive, I. Thought, what's next for me? And it was clear to me that it means another startup, like, and I thought, what's the right, products to build, like business ideas. And then I was introduced to the chairman of the board of sis eight and 20 minutes into the meeting it was clear that this is a perfect match to me. So this is how I ended up at SysAid and the reason was that a lot of the time when you bring a high yield CEO, right, that's not the founder you are brought in to like fix something really bad. Like, the opportunities are, a lot of them are like broken companies and, and this is why a lot of the founders just, they will pick to do another startup versus taking someone else company. And in this case, the company was amazing growing, great company, great set of clients, great set of people. So that was the first check the box. And the second I looked at the market and I said, no one yet is really conquering this market with ai. And through my almost 20 years of experience with ai in building AI products, I've learned that there are different different use cases that AI is not gonna do a good job, it's gonna be perfect, and IT service management is one of these places. AI needs data, freshness always with the data. And it needs people to fine tune it in many cases. And and it needs users with patience for it to be sometime, most of the time perfect and sometime make some mistakes. And here goes ITSM it mostly focused on employees that have much more patient than like a customer support was. Usually they're upset. They're always upset, right? And at the same time, this is a fully closed environment because the it not only controls. The tickets, the knowledge base, the workflows, and helping their employees, but also in every laptop, in almost every company that in the world, the IT teams also runs executables that are helping the it when those issue to monitor and see that that the laptops are secures, et cetera. So now you got access to the machine. Access to the tickets and the knowledge base and all of it. It's live breathing and pull pulling data, you can generate a fully AI contained environment that's big. Right? So I saw that opportunity and the combination of SysAid being a great company, I felt it's a match.

Dan Balcauski: 7:56

Hmm. Well, and the IT folks, I think you're right, right? You're in a support role, which there is, there's IT help desk which could be a support role where maybe their in internal customers aren't happy, but, there's compared to, your customer support, like, Hey, I'm paying for this thing and it's broken. It's very reactive and like, how fast can we close tickets? Whereas the IT folks also tend to be tinkerers, right? They're always kind of looking for a better way. They're technologists they're looking to like, oh, like, what if I stitched this thing together, this thing together, wouldn't that be cool? And, I could, be able to do my job much more efficiently. And so, it's a fun market to, to play in. I completely agree and I have fond

Avi Kedmi: 8:30

have a,

Dan Balcauski: 8:31

in the IT world.

Avi Kedmi: 8:32

have a statement that I've learned through my year and a half here is that I say on this IT market, it's like it's not going anywhere, and the competitors are not waiting for anyone, right? Not going

Dan Balcauski: 8:47

Unpack that for me.

Avi Kedmi: 8:48

not going anywhere means. It's a massive market. It's just some sort of, if you in four years will build. A, a company that's solving an IT need like mobile device management. Like security management, not now just open, installed the company in four years and only a year or two after you'll go to market, you can still have a massive and big company that's successful. The market keeps growing and growing and growing. It's total addressable market. So the market is not going anywhere. It's just actually, it's growing and at the same time. The competitors are not waiting for anyone. Each one is driving the bus for more products, more ai. So that, that's a bit unpacking, man, that statement

Dan Balcauski: 9:35

Well, so, so SysAid, you joined obviously you said, it wasn't broken in the maybe classic sense of the word, but you know, as you looked at it, what did you feel was really holding the company back from achieving its next stage of growth?

Avi Kedmi: 9:49

I. Yeah, so I have a philosophy on it that I don't know if all CEOs would say the same, but I would say companies that are B2B SaaS,

Dan Balcauski: 10:03

Mm-Hmm.

Avi Kedmi: 10:03

most important thing, put aside people, of course, is the product. If you have a great product with great usability, and it works well, right, not ups and downs. And it provides a solve to a pain or a need, even with a mediocre go to market, you'll be a very successful company. The reverse will not work. It's very hard to take products that are not great to become massively successful. That would be my philosophy. SysAid the need here was. To take the product from his glory days and bring it back to be glory days, innovate a lot more, modernize the user interface interfaces, expand more capabilities, et cetera. So that was the biggest task in hand for me in this case.

Dan Balcauski: 11:05

So, well, so obviously, so you had this view or philosophy around, the importance of, this investment in the product and, where it could be, maybe how did you think about getting the organization to sort of buy into that perspective? Were there elements that you think were critical to kind of bringing that into reality?

Avi Kedmi: 11:27

Yeah, so the first thing. First, it's not an easy change, right? 20 years company, 200 employees. It's not a 10 people company that you can change overnight. And I would say the first thing is about a shared mission and a clear vision of how you're gonna get there, and that was one of my top things that I was focused on and few months after I joined. Here come the mission, which is our mission, is to liberate organizations by putting AI to work for them and their people. And when you put a very crisp and powerful purpose together, first people start to change their behavior. What do they think? What do they build in products? What do they think when they're in the finance team? When you are hiring people, oh, I wanna be part of a company that's its mission. So, to take a company to the next level, it my experience, and I would say everybody has their own way. It all starts with the top of the spear, which is the mission and the vision. And once you have that and it's not yet another one, right, then things fall in much more trivial.

Dan Balcauski: 12:43

So mission and vision can be. Fuzzy concepts. So just like, how do you think about like, for, like, how would you distinguish the two? Because I found that, people could even, talk about mission and some other person would be like, well, that's not mission, that's a vision. Like,

Avi Kedmi: 12:57

I will tell you first, how do you achieve it? And then what's my perspective on what's the difference? I think through my way of managing and generally I think it's all about experience. E experience defines a way for us to be creative and to come with some brilliancy sometimes. So I took the management team later on, also the larger forum, and in the management team, I just brought them to a room somewhere in the desert. It's a true story, and I made sure one of the people there that HR leader will take all the 20 top companies in the world. And print out their mission and vision and put it on the wall. And then I put people in the room and I said, first of all, just go over it and read one by one and see the power of it. Right? And then you will understand what's the meaning, right? So you stand and you see, wow, Tesla is about changing the world to be more electric related, and global warming. But its vision, which is the first part is to build and lead the whole world in transformation energy for cars. So you're saying, wow. So the mission is to transform the world, and the vision for now is about starting with cars. Okay. So you then go to some other companies like Uber, like Microsoft, like Google, and you see some of them. Take a different angle to it. And then I got the same question. I said, it doesn't matter. It all connects to well is the purpose of you in the world and where you want to go. And it can be in the mission, it can be in the vision. I personally like that the mission is big and the vision is phase one. That's what worked for me throughout the years. So, and the Tesla is a good example for it, but I would say, the mission has to be very big. That's the base start of it. Right? So this was my trick of of bringing people to an experience that drives creativity from them. And then the other part is you never end these sessions with a line. You never. Right. It doesn't work like that. It, when we were out of this offsite, we did every week, another hour and two, we exposed other people in the company. We got their feedback and you keep iterating on it and then you have it. And once you have it, you see it Like when I think now, and it, by the way, in all the screens here in the company, when I think now I cannot say, wow, how did we get to it? I know there were five months. Of iteration to get to our mission is to liberate organizations by putting AI to work for them and their people. By the way, the last part was their people. You may say, why? Why are you not liberating organization? Because there's a lot of people said, this is scary, AI is scary. And I said, but you know, the truth is you've already outsourced some of your life to ai. You wanna know what it is When your kid comes to you at the evening and say. What's the weather in the moon? 20 th 30 years back you would say, let me check this encyclopedia and let me find it to you. And then, is it the last version of the encyclopedia? Maybe it's the wrong answer. And now you just tell them, go Google it. You trust Google, you it's more productive. It's fast, and all of it is Now you've outsourced to ai. You just don't call it like that. But this is why we've also said. For them, for their people because it is important to know that above all, at the phase one of all, ai, it takes us as human being and make us superpower. That will be the phase one, and we're seeing it agent assist and all like we are now becoming more and more superhuman. I have a like a, an a, a hiring and I had to write a job description. The world is not about writing it. I gave a prompt. I wrote it a few times and then. This case open. I just said, here is your dog. Here is your, and it was perfect, but I had to know how to talk to it and it saved three hours to me.

Dan Balcauski: 17:12

I love so many parts of that story. So, just a, it's a quick recap of highlights. I heard. So one was, you did that process iteratively starting with kind of looking at examples and sort of using those as inspiration. That emotional component is key because, it, that iterative process of expanding the scope of people that are resonating or not resonating, I think,'cause I think we've all been on the other side of. Executive team comes out and rolls reveals their new mission, vision statement, and it's been, it's so like bland and overprocessed that we all just go like, what is

Avi Kedmi: 17:52

I yeah I, by the way, if you go to my LinkedIn, the biggest volumes of comments and views is a post where I took Nike. The company, Nikes famous 1960 Guiding Principles. I dunno if you've seen it ever. I dunno if you've seen it.

Dan Balcauski: 18:10

I I mean, I probably I have read shoe dogs, so I'm

Avi Kedmi: 18:13

He doesn't put it in Shoe Dog. I read it

Dan Balcauski: 18:15

Oh, he is not in Shoe Dog.

Avi Kedmi: 18:16

because I'm not sure he is proud of what's there, but this is one of the very. It's a crazy document that's very aggressive, right? Like 10 commandments of how you work here, how we're gonna be successful, right? And one of them is like, number seven was like, it's not gonna be pretty. But the and people gave a lot of feedback, et cetera and one of the people wrote them, which is important, all of these mission, vision, values. It's not by some three executive sitting in a room and a consulting company. It's the people that work. That the many people at the company that feel this is part of what the, they decide that the company should do, so same goes for the mission vision. On the mission vision from a 200 people, I would say there were about 50 people involved.

Dan Balcauski: 19:04

There's so many, there's so many areas I'd love to PPL plumb, but I, there's also a bunch of topics I want to go over with you. So, so I know you did at one point also bring the founder back to the organization. So I want to understand how that decision came to be and how that figured into kind of this larger getting the company to the next stage of growth that you were talking about.

Avi Kedmi: 19:25

so. I was a founder for seven years on the company I built, and then I was 11 years as an executive at a company that I didn't found, but I felt it was mine. And when I joined seas a I really, I was worried how much time it will take me to feel as if it's my company also. Right. And literally three days after I joined, I said. I can do it. I can feel it. Well, where is the founder? Where is he here? Right? Because that's some sort of this rock. And the founder of SysAid was the one that wrote most of the code in the first five, 10 years on his own. So, I gave him a call and I said, it's time for you to come back because we need to build an AI platform, and I think you're the one that's gonna build it. And he said, I'm coming tomorrow. 10 years. He wasn't at the company. 24 hours he appeared, I think at the end. And it's a dramatic impact, not because we have a power of such a person. Right. But it's also, I think it's a message for a lot of the, for a lot of the people you know, of what it means when a founder is still there 22 years after. So I feel like the board says, we, the board, they, they said that they anticipated a lot of my moves, but this one was not anticipated and was the best move.

Dan Balcauski: 21:00

Interesting. So I find it fascinating because I, especially coming in as a non founder, CEO, one of the challenges that I've heard of is like, when the founders are still there, that can often create tension because, like you mentioned really like how long will it take to become my company? Was there ways that, that either didn't manifest or that you were able to create ways to work together collaboratively such that that wasn't a attention?

Avi Kedmi: 21:29

I think that I would say at founders and generally leaders, especially those with a lot of passion you have to have a level of conversation with them that's very authentic. And that is also supporting a lot of their needs. So I dunno, maybe it's my age that I'm, I got to 50 and and maybe, I don't know, experience, I dunno where it is, but I try not to fight on things, but more to understand the other side and what do they need to excel. That's what I tried to do and I felt that the founder. Wants a, like he wants a place to lead something that's big, that's transformative versus, Hey, just come in, let's fix bugs. Right? So, but it, it also in these kind of relationships, you cannot, like, it's not set and go, it's like you, on a weekly basis, you gotta spend time with people. They have to feel, and they have to also truly be part of the decision making. So, like. A few days ago I'm working on the objective OKRs for 2025. I'm a big believer in OKRs. And then I go, I sit with him, I share all, and I write notes to see his feedback. I just I want people's feedback, especially from people that are key drivers in the org, whether they're in the management or not.

Dan Balcauski: 22:50

You had said, the board didn't anticipate this move, but it turned out to be a really good move. Like how do you think about the impact that that decision has had on the organization in sort of meeting those high level goals that you were trying to set out? I.

Avi Kedmi: 23:03

Extreme. Basically, he came in, he had, he took few people with him, including some product person. Amazing one, they took four months, they built something. And we went like MVP beta January 1st. We started to sell, we, in 10 months, we sold to more than 150 clients, this product. Right. And it contributed a lot to expansions. Ex acquisition just. Huge impact. And when people read about SysAid today, they already get a filter of, they innovate with ai, and it's real, and those real customers. And it's like, it's happening not just an idea. So big impact.

Dan Balcauski: 23:47

So, so, so what do you think that it was, so obviously, he was able to accelerate from sort of day one and sort of get a product, into market super quickly. Like how, like what does that mean in terms of what he was able to do versus maybe what the status

Avi Kedmi: 24:05

great. Great

Dan Balcauski: 24:05

Was, was, was everyone else?

Avi Kedmi: 24:07

So it's a great question. I didn't write it till some like these PDFs where you can find all the web that to talks about how to transform or how to accelerate and usually there are three rules. The first we talked about shared vision, people aligned to the strategy. The second is split between what you have today that works and it's like a cash cow and make sure it's like profitable and it's executing. And the only way you measure it is by growth and profitability, but you squeeze it a bit, right? It's you. You don't go while there on resources and on the right side you innovate and there you don't measure success on money. You only measure on the speed on execution and iterations. That's the only thing you measure, how fast they're iterating, pushing product to market, getting customer feedback, et cetera. So this is the second rule, and the way you do it is by the third rule, which is align the innovations to report directly to the CEO. Or to a C level if it's a very big company to a C level cleaned up, just clean up everyone so they can run. So I don't wanna get too much detail, but I, that's, we've cleaned up a lot, including restructuring in order for this few people, not to be interrupted or not to have days of meetings and approvals, et cetera. So again, I didn't invent some of this methodology. Shared vision, innovation versus cash cow measured by iteration versus measured by profitability and growth. And the last piece is aligned, the aligned the org structure differently in these kind of things. So you have swim lenss that do not have anyone blocking them, and they're not, hey, but you know, but they're not generating revenues while, yeah, just drive, go drive.

Dan Balcauski: 26:13

Yeah. Well, there's, yeah I love that idea of yeah, sort of eliminate or removing the barriers to their speed of execution, because I think everyone has been in that role where you're asked to take on, oh, it's a C level, it's CEO number one priority project, but the, the IC product leader is, two, three levels down in the organization. And so, okay, we've made some progress. It's time for a QBR and now that IC product manager, they've gotta go for a round of reviews with the their

Avi Kedmi: 26:44

We were exactly, by the

Dan Balcauski: 26:46

and then with the

Avi Kedmi: 26:46

it's crazy. I remember I came to a meeting with a small AI team, and then the person, one of the product managers came to the meeting. Her manager came to the meeting, the director came to the meeting. You got like four people that are. In the middle, they're very smart. Sorry. They're smart, they're powerful people and they can give, they can contribute. But at this point you have an individual contributor that has a lot of people to go through to decide and and usually that doesn't drive things fast.

Dan Balcauski: 27:25

Yeah, you spent a lot of time in those as well on messaging of like, well, let's not say this, let's say that instead, because that'll land better, right? And so you're like, well, well, your customers at the end of the day don't care about any of that, right? Like you're, I don't know, like you're preventing. People from hearing maybe information that wouldn't be presented in the most politically correct way, but yeah it does, it, it changes, where you're expending energy. And that ends up being a sort of an invisible drag, right? It's work like, you can't say anyone's slacking off, but it's a tax you're paying on that speed of execution. I do wanna talk, you brought up AI a couple of times and you. You've seen a long arc of ai.'cause I believe your original company that you had founded was a, was an machine learning startup. Is that correct?

Avi Kedmi: 28:07

Full fledge. Yeah.

Dan Balcauski: 28:08

full

Avi Kedmi: 28:09

Full fledge. We wrote the code in matlab, then moved it to Java. We wrote three patents. We fought on them for two years or three years. We, they got accepted. So, predictive modeling with online models and offline models. Really I, this was a crazy journey.

Dan Balcauski: 28:26

Do you see those, these as two entirely separate worlds? Are there lessons that you've learned from your early days in working in machine learning to this new generative AI world that we're in today? I.

Avi Kedmi: 28:39

Yep. And I think, by the way, this is part of SysAid success on AI because a lot of people jump on AI A and think that immediately human is out of the loop. It doesn't work like that. AI can spot a hair from 10 miles forward, but can miss a massive tree that blocking their eyes, and that's life. That's ai, right? And you have to understand that AI comes with ability to customize. Must come with ability to monitor and fine tune an approval process must and must come with understanding of the results of it and the ROI and the success. If you don't bring these few, you will see companies not using it eventually because AI will always have its need for fine tune and monitoring. And that's what we've done. Version one. Came with it. And we didn't say let's just, because we knew that will buy us the trust of the other people. And you see a lot of the companies today, we, they would say, yeah, AI can just answer instead of you. And that's correct, but the person wants to see what's the answer. And if he doesn't like the answer, he wants to correct it. That's how life works. Right. So, I think this is the big part, and I will say this another one, which is I've seen through these 20 years machine learning life person heavy on NLPs engines and language models. Generative AI is just it's so extreme that we could talk on the scary part. It's transformative on levels that people cannot imagine. I think people, 90% of the world of employees, developers, managers, leaders, the way, when I talk to a lot of 90%, if not more, they do not understand where are we now in this cycle of what's going on. We wanna crisp. Of a transformation that's so extreme that people will never imagine how the high tech used to work.

Dan Balcauski: 31:13

Well, I'm curious about that. Like, so if you think about the ITSM space that SysAid's playing in, like I guess. How do you see that, that transformation playing out over the next several years? Or are there early kind of green shoots you're already seeing and how people are thinking about the

Avi Kedmi: 31:27

Yeah. So I think that what you'll, what you're gonna see and seeing already the first thing the first thing that's happening in this it, in this market. So while we're going to a world of fully AI contained, which means that the whole IT team is run by ai. And there are a few people monitoring, fine tuning, strategizing, AI to the right places, right? You can see very quickly like some IT person waking up. Good morning. C eight. I see ticket 3, 3, 4 is open for about two days and no one is solving it. Reach out to the customer, to the employee. See what's going on. Please uninstall. MS teams and work with that person on the time that it's convenient to them to restart. Write a summary that summarize what I need. If it doesn't work, go to the web and find still what are the issues and come back with a solution and write a script that maybe will alter how Ms. Team is installed. Get my approval before you do it and make sure you're nice to that person and say warm words, he just got back from vacation. Report back. Thank you. Bye. Ticket 7, 7, 8. It's easy. Do this, like this is where we're going. Phase one of it is having conversational interfaces for agents and for employees. Once you have this, they are now the interfaces that connect, and you'll see in these conversational interfaces becoming more and more powerful. If first part was a lot about smart answers and finding the right answer, combining it with the right knowledge base and generating an answer, you are gonna see a lot more actions happening. Right? Hey, I'm a new employee. Someone wrote my last name, Tchaikovsky wrong. It's missing an H, so can you fix it? This is my last name, right? So you would see that AI will understand it. It'll find the right tool that was built by AI and that was approved by a human being. And it would just, okay, got it. Run it done. Can you check now? And knows to go to these five systems and if it's missing a system that doesn't have access, it'll write the integration on the fly. We are going there we are going there faster. Than we think. But I'll tell you a story, an interesting story. I was last night in a dinner with a friend that I really appreciate, worked with me in the past, brilliant guy, and I haven't met him for six months. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I have a big idea related to the human body and software, like some crazy idea. And I said, and I'm like. In my old thinking, what am I saying to him? Wow. I think it's a crazy idea. I dunno if you can do it, but if you'll do it, it's big. You're raising money probably, right? Did you meet a venture? C and I'm this spiel of what we know how to do in the last 20 years of startup or find a, an angel give you half a million dollar, 2 million. And he said, no, I bought three screens. I have a tropic on one. Open AI on the second, and Germany on the third. I do 10 hours or 20 hours a day with all of them, and I think I built most of the software part of what I need. I said, what do you mean you've built most of it? He said, yeah, I have the API, I have the documentation, I have the logic, I have the website, and I'm like, anyone else in the company? And he said, no, it's just me And four months of my life. This is where we are now. Is it perfect? Not, does it need to write 50 or a hundred times the prompts until he gets the right code? Yes. We need that eventually today. A developer that will help him fine tune yes, but what he did in four months alone, I was like building a company. This is where we're going. We're going because the speed of how these systems, the Gen AI are evolving is faster than the adoption curve. Unique. Well, in the industry in the last 20, 25 years, the adoption was slower than the power of what it could contribute as value.

Dan Balcauski: 36:03

Yeah. That's fascinating. And yeah, I we, we will live in certainly interesting times coming up in the next few years. One, one more question on ai,'cause it is a question I get pretty often, which is, so, so you've done this work to align the company on, this world of AI and, increasing the speed of innovation. But you know, I'm sure as a CEO, you pressure the board. It's like, okay, well, when do we see a return on this innovation? How do you, how have you thought about the monetization aspect of these capabilities? W how do you think of that in the life cycle of working on this bringing this AI vision to market for SysAid?

Avi Kedmi: 36:38

Wow. It's a great it's a great topic. Analysts Gartner Foster talks a lot about it. I also consult a lot with them. There are three. Options that I thought are available, and I'll tell you which one I picked. We picked as a team one option, which is to say, AI is providing value. It's a premium product. Let's make it expensive, and then later on it'll be commoditized. This is how the world is going. Option one, right? Option two is to say, let's make it some sort of. No money, free everything, because if we're all about ai right, then just you cannot have a customer that doesn't use it. Right? And the third option, which was, I call it the price of making, being serious in business, is to say, let's charge for it, but not a lot, not extreme, just charge for it. So we see that they're serious. And we picked number three, and it works well for us, but it's a very simple pricing. It's a list price on it. And we made it very simple and it's a, I was in UK in one of the biggest gym chain luxury ones, great company, and then I, to prove you to go to market. I was demoing and I was talking to the guy, the IT leader, they are existing clients. And I said, it's gonna cost you that. And he said, that's what it's gonna cost. Send the contract. I'm signing. Signing it today. Because he didn't, we didn't cross his burial to be greedy. We just wanted to get it out. But we want to be serious because just enabling it, if you didn't pay, many times people will not use. So this is where we landed, but I think some companies are doing well also by providing it free. So people are starting to get like a habit of only using the AI part.

Dan Balcauski: 38:41

And I, something you just said at the end there I really loved, which is that this whole idea of just access does not equal value. Like, just'cause they have it available to them, but charging them something does. I like the way you phrased it. It proves that they're serious. Look, I can talk to you all day. I do wanna start wrapping things up with Some clo rapid closeout questions. Are you ready?

Avi Kedmi: 39:01

Ready.

Dan Balcauski: 39:02

When you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with, is there anyone who just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building companies now?

Avi Kedmi: 39:13

I will say it's crazy. I'll tell you that. It's my wife, but I wanna explain why it's, there's a unique story. I'm married, we're together 25 4 years and. My wife, she's a cell biology assistant professor in the Whitesman Institute, so it's very successful. She has her own lab. She's a builder, just machines within your body. And for many years we that we were together, she never logged into our bank account. She. I'll say she doesn't even have a credit card on her name. She is, he doesn't care about money. She uses it when she needs to use, but it doesn't bother her. It doesn't takes in her cycles of right is like, how much do I have really? But this allows her to be very clean of tactics. And just focus on strategy. So I would say a lot of her advices to me when I have challenges are just brilliant because she's not saying, here's my advice, but yes. Maybe the employee will say that, but it is, but it's, the competitors will also, it's just very clean into this is what I would do. So I think she's the most influential person on this part of my life.

Dan Balcauski: 40:39

What a what a intimidating intellectual and powerful partner that you have. Well, well, thank you to her for supporting you. Being a CEO can be taxing. Is there anything that you do physically, emotionally, spiritually, to keep yourself on the top of your game?

Avi Kedmi: 40:58

I think people so, there's this lot of these, podcast right by, I'm not gonna say the name, but these famous motivator people. I think doing sports a few times a week if possible, every day. I'm not on the every day, but like, I think sports is one of the biggest driver of ability to have clarity in your head.

Dan Balcauski: 41:20

Getting a, getting a sweat can help your brain get much clearer. Uh, I completely agree with that, with

Avi Kedmi: 41:24

But I don't have hobbies. I would say I wish I had, but I try to do family work and some sort of nothing left outside.

Dan Balcauski: 41:32

Well, four, four kids leading a company. I imagine you have time to sleep. If I gave you a billboard, you could put any advice on there for other B2B Sass e trying to scale their company, what would it say?

Avi Kedmi: 41:42

I, I would say that I think that if you spend 60% of your time as a CEO. On the product, you have a much better chance to accelerate whatever growth you have. I think at the end amazing products have great success and not great products. It's very hard to make them successful with a fabulous go to market. And I think that we, especially within an era where people just expect great products with great ux, that works well. So I think if as a CEO is I think you should spend at least 50, 60% of your time on it. I think the ROI on it will be much bigger than some others.

Dan Balcauski: 42:32

Spend 60% of your time in making your product excellent. Love it. Avi, this has been a blast. If our listeners want to connect with you, learn more about SysAid, how can they do that?

Avi Kedmi: 42:40

I am on LinkedIn. You can find me easy there. I would say I don't miss a message on LinkedIn, right? I get people asking for a job or people telling me their vision and I usually unless it's someone selling something, I usually respond. I values people time and so that, that's the easiest way to connect.

Dan Balcauski: 43:00

Awesome. Well, I will put the link in the show notes for our listeners, everyone that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling. Secrets. Thank you to Avi for sharing his journey, insights, and invaluable tips for our listeners. If you found this conversation as excited to remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.