Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast

#174: Ex-Microsoft Head of Product: Anand Subbaraj on Building AI for the Trades

• John Wilson • Season 1 • Episode 174

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Anand Subbaraj, former Head of Product at Microsoft, joins us to share his journey from big tech to building Zuper, a game-changing field service management platform.

We dig into why he left Microsoft to tackle a massive industry problem, the challenges of launching a tech startup and how Zuper is reshaping field service management with flexibility, automation, and a seamless customer experience.

Special Thanks to Avoca

Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI is here to help your team identify existing issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.
 
Use our link to schedule a demo: https://calendly.com/d/cp54-9jr-nht/avoca-ai-demo?month=2025-01

Shout Out to Supply House

Big shoutout to Supply Housefor helping us meet our fast turnaround times. With 250,000+ SKUs across plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, they get us what we need—fast.

Their Trademaster program offers free shipping, returns, and discounts, all with no membership fee.

Check them out at www.supplyhouse.com!

Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X

Episode Guest:
Anand Subbaraj on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anandsubbaraj

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC

Anand Subbaraj: I'm a product person. I love building product.

We ended up creating a marketplace of about 60 plus applications. AI is going to augment and help technicians to improve productivity and efficiency. AI needs to be the foundation of everything that we are building. 

John Wilson: We're about eight months into using Avoca and Avoca has been an awesome partner for us in our call center.

So what Avoca does for us is they do two different things. One, they have their coach product and coach. has been helping us do what it says. Coach our CSRs every single day. It listens to every call and uses AI technology to basically pick apart that call and tell us where we can improve. And for the last eight months, we've been consistently improving our scores, which has been awesome.

The other product they have is just conventional booking, and it's an AI tool that books over the phone. Customer calls in and it either handles overflow, as in our phones are full, or it does nights and weekends for us. And a customer will call in and actually deal with an AI. Agent all the way through booking and the savings inside call center has allowed us to ramp up our marketing to continue to grow Even more.

Thank you Avoca. And thank you Tyson for your partnership.

Jack Carr: Welcome back to owned and operated today we have Anand from Zuper a awesome AI powered solution for your CRM system. Anand, how are you doing today? 

Anand Subbaraj: Thank you for having me here. 

Jack Carr: So Anand, you have a absolutely unique, maybe not unique to the technology world, but unique to our side of the world of home services is you started off at Microsoft before creating this product.

Can you talk a little bit about your background and Microsoft and what you did there? 

Anand Subbaraj: Great, for sure. I have worked at Microsoft for about 15 years, have been living in Seattle in the U. S. for 20 plus years, and at Microsoft I was a product manager to start with, went on to lead some of the most amazing products created at Microsoft, and I have this unique, credential of Creating a product that I use by 1 billion users globally.

That went on to become a Gartner magic quadrant leader. My role specifically at Microsoft was to. incubate new products and to take on incumbents in the industry. And I love doing that at Microsoft.

Jack Carr: Super interesting and talk about a unique role in that you got to incubate stuff from zero to one with all the resources in Microsoft. and then when you say take on incumbents, were these previously established platforms or was it like you were at the forefront fighting other forefront companies?

Anand Subbaraj: No, these were incumbents as in market leaders. So they were, in the B2B space. Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders in B2C space, they were the leading players when we started incubating those products at Microsoft. And I love those challenges to take on the heavyweights. And, it just gave me a lot of adrenaline rush and a lot of excitement and motivation to take them on.

Jack Carr: I love it. And moving forward, as we start talking about Zuper today, it sounds like you're trying it again because this, field has some, the CRM for home service industries particularly has quite a few big players and incumbents that you're, going up against. Before we get into that though, can we take a step back and, so you, left Microsoft, how long ago, when did you start Zuper?

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, so Zuper was started in, 2020, 2021 during that time. And, the journey is interesting and I started Zuper based on a terrible personal experience that I had while getting my refrigerator serviced. I bought this refrigerator from a large global brand and within a few weeks it started giving some issues.

And I was in love with this make and model of refrigerator. Nobody waits for a refrigerator for six months. I waited for this one and I got that. And within a few weeks. There were a few issues. It was just making some weird noise. And I had to reach out to the customer support. And that journey of reaching out to customer support many, times, I probably reached out to the customer support about 10 times, three different technicians showed up at my place at different times.

And it was about eight weeks. Since I first reported the issue that it was resolved. And I was thinking, what does it take for this large global organization to offer a better experience to the customers? And in this age of Uberization of all services from ride hailing, home delivery. My experience was just archaic and painful, and I'm a product person.

I love building products. And I was thinking at that time that, this is a real problem, and I wanted to learn about what could take for this business to offer that great differentiated experience to its consumers. And that was my journey. That was my foray into learning more about the space. And I spend the next maybe 10 to 12 months.

learning about the service businesses. Then I came across field service management or, CRM or field service, and it was very interesting. And I thought that this is a real opportunity. And I am this guy who is very curious, love building products, love taking on challenges. And that was how Zuper was created.

Zuper means extremely super. And I'm going to empower organizations to transform their field workforce into Zuper professionals and offer Zuper experience to their customers.

Jack Carr: I love it. That's a great name. Is that how you came up with the name? You, yes. Perfect. That's so perfect. Okay, so you're, are you still working at Microsoft as you start building this product or was there an exit with Microsoft?

You were looking for something to do and this experience just happened while you were looking. 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, I was still at Microsoft when I encountered the issue. I thought about, doing something in this space. But then when we came up with the idea and we started building, I quit Microsoft and started, Found by founding this company and building the product.

Jack Carr: So with that transition, I mean you're transitioning from fortune what 10 to now absolute complete entrepreneurship Can you talk to us about? we have a lot of people on our podcast that listeners that listen to this podcast, that they're doing the same thing. They're coming from fortune 500 companies, and they're not going into the tech side.

They're going into HVAC, the home services side. Can you talk a little bit about that process for you of leaving this, fortune 10 for, to blaze your own trail? 

What were some of the challenges? 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, it was an interesting time when I quit and that was the year of 2020 during peak COVID.

it was the year of pandemic and, the biggest challenge at that time was to convince the family that it is the right career move. To leave such a privileged job, like you said, Fortune 10, what not, like this is one of the best companies. That I dreamt off to be part off and I had a tremendous career at Microsoft.

But like I said, I love building products. I love taking on challenges. And when I learned about this space, I just got extremely passionate about solving this problem because I could see a real problem. And this was not just a problem localized to a certain region. It seemed like a global problem.

And once I got convinced that this is something I truly want to do. The passion kicked in and, a decision that I never regretted, but the biggest challenge at that time was to convince the family that, this is the right career move and the risk that I was taking is going to be rewarding.

Jack Carr: Yeah. I could definitely understand the, hesitancy from, your family to say, Hey, what are you doing? this is a for sure thing. And this is what people work years for to go and do your own path. But there's something so rewarding about entrepreneurship and building for yourself that I don't think you can explain to many people who haven't done it.

The late nights and stuff all feels a little bit more worth it when it's for yourself. I can speak from, personal experience there. Yeah, awesome. and okay, you've had this experience, you, leave Microsoft, you convince the family, talk about the early days of Zuper. What were you focused on and how did you, how are you thinking about the issue?

Because when you open up field service management, the idea of field service management for home services, it can be. extremely overwhelming. There's so many items inside field service management from dispatching to call taking to, how you handle payments. Like really it's, it doesn't ever stop, which is why there's the large companies like service Titan are continuing to expand modules after modules.

How are, how did you in those early days look at creating even just getting to the MVP. 

Anand Subbaraj: So when I explored this problem and came across field service for the first time and I searched for field service products, probably I came across 150 products in the market. It seemed like a crowded market. It seemed like this is an age old problem.

It was not a category creation that I was, going to perf going to do. It was crowded space. I came up with four hypotheses at that time. Number one was service organizations were thinking of field service management as an extension to their CRM or ERP products, which is not the case. Service organizations require a niche specialized field service management product to manage their operations on the field.

Secondly, field service management, like you said, it is a lot of different capabilities, but it needs to integrate with organizations tech stack, whether they are using an ERP product, an accounting product, a payment solution, payroll products and so forth. 

Third was that most of the field service management products seem very opinionated about how businesses needs to run their business. When businesses were looking for a product that would complement their skill set and it would not inhibit or constrain them from performing their day to day activities.

And lastly, in this age of uberization of customer experience, The end customer mindset has evolved over the years. Now, every customer or consumer are conditioned by the likes of modern service. Businesses and service platforms like Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, and others. And they're expecting that same kind of experience from every service organization, no matter whether you're getting a landscaping done, getting your gutter repaired, or getting, your appliance repaired by someone.

They're expecting that same kind of seamless end to end experience. And these were the four hypotheses with which we started Zuper. Our goal at that time was to create flexible and adaptable platform that can be used by businesses to run their business. And our MVP focused around building an open API with a great architecture that can work across different industries.

And our first major customer happened to be one of the largest furniture retailers in the world to manage their installation and assembly crew. And that was a great milestone for us to have that kind of a big logo. And from that point, we realized that we have a great business in our hand and we can scale this up.

Jack Carr: Always curious. How did that first customer come about? Where did you find them? How did those initial conversations go? What did that look like? 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, and that's, that was such an exciting experience. I still get goosebumps when I think about that. So one of my learnings was to leverage the personal network as much as possible.

So when we came up with the idea, the first thing that we did was Go through our LinkedIn and other network and figure out how many of our network is working in service organizations and to tap on that network to learn more about what they are doing, how they are running their business and so forth.

And through that network, I came across the VP of service at these large fortune 500 organization. I was just having a regular chat and learned that they are opening a store in a new country and they're coming in with a new business model. to offer their installers and assemblers. they wanted to adopt a platform that helps them provide a differentiated experience to their customers.

They did not call that field service. They did not call that CRM. Their end outcome was a great experience to their customers who are getting those services performed at the customer's location. at that point in time, I was thinking somehow we need to win this deal. This is why we exist. 

We are putting that deal and we still celebrate. that milestone as Zuper Day, huge milestone for us, and maybe one of the reasons why we still exist today. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. that's a very fun win. those, that first big deal that, that really solidifies you as a, actual company doing actual things and proof of concept is so huge.

And okay. So you get this first deal, everything's going smooth now. Talk about the expansion, you guys work in multiple countries globally. there's a scaling aspect that I don't think many people truly understand what does that look like to be able to scale throughout the United States, but also scaling globally?

Anand Subbaraj: Absolutely. Fantastic question. So one of my biggest learnings from being at Microsoft was to create this global teams. in almost all my projects at Microsoft that I work, I have global teams, in India, Israel, China and other places. And I love building those teams. scaling and building a team globally is extremely challenging.

You need to have a culture that empowers the global team to perform at the best possible potential. In terms of the challenges, the first challenge was identifying the niche for Zuper and differentiating Zuper from the rest of the platforms out there. And the way we did that was we wanted to create a platform that is adaptable to the business, that is flexible, configurable, customizable and can meet the organization's need. Our tagline or motto is Field Service Your Way. and we have a trademark on this, but that has really helped us to talk to the customer saying that you have always worked with companies that have a non flexible product. And you are now looking at something that allows you to run the business the way you want to run and grow your business the way you want to grow.

And Zuper fits that bill and gives you this adaptable platform. As we started winning customers, the next challenge was to scaling this to build this global organization. We have a global team of 200 plus employees who are distributed across the globe. And as we start building this global team, the biggest factor comes in is creating that culture that promotes a high intensity and high performing team across the globe.

And like I said, my experience in Microsoft helped us create this team and the structure and the framework that promotes growth across global organization. The third was I mentioned about integrations with other platforms, and I, at that point in time, could not find that many field service products that could integrate with other applications.

So we ended up creating a marketplace of About 60 plus applications that we could integrate with. So we had to build a framework of creating fast paced integrations in a seamless way so that our platform could integrate with all of these other best of breed, solution. And our goal was to enable businesses create the best of breed solution that caters to their need and helps them, improve their operational efficiency and grow their business.

Jack Carr: Yeah, that's extremely interesting. It's especially the field service your way portion because you bring up a furniture installation company, right? Or furniture sales and then the installation aspect. You're right. Like service titan would be a terrible use case just because it would like the product market fit for service titan to them would not work.

It just wouldn't make any sense and so there's all these little niche industries that, I remember talking, we talked with, Oh, goodness, Ryan, who owned pool companies, pool cleaning companies down in Texas, and he said that he was building his own niche, field service management because he's tried the ones out there, and they just weren't right for him because none of them were built for that specific industry and don't have that flexibility to be able to, do what you're doing and so that's incredibly interesting and 60 APIs.

I know enough about coding to know that's a nightmare but at the same time that's also really interesting that you guys were able to Work in that many integrations. and to have them all work to a point where they're actually functioning.

Anand Subbaraj: Absolutely and now as we started scaling that we started working with other industries and verticals At this point in time, we work across multiple industries, and that is in itself a challenge from two aspects.

One is to have the product flexible enough to work across industries. And second, from a business perspective, to learn about those industries, to talk the language of the customers, ensuring that customers can trust you as an organization and the product to cater to the needs of their business. We serve manufacturing, which is our core, the furniture retail and others, which come into that manufacturing umbrella.

And we primarily work with discrete product manufacturers. Then we work with HVAC electrical pumping companies and then pool maintenance companies. And now we are adding roofing as one of the other trades that we are going to serve. So to have a platform that is flexible across all of these different industries, and sub industries and then to be able to learn about all these different industries and be able to convince the customer that Zuper is the right platform for their needs.

Jack Carr: And so you're building this global team, you're putting everything together, you're starting to onboard multiple different industries. You mentioned earlier that, that, AI is a big portion of this. what makes your platform an AI powered platform as opposed to, AI, to, to me at least, as someone who is not as, computer science literate as many are, but, what does that mean?

To the consumer that's AI powered. Is it also just a buzzword for you to for sales or is it actually driving? use 

Anand Subbaraj: yeah, so back in the days when I was in Microsoft I was working in Azure data, and I started working on machine learning and AI many years before when AI started becoming the buzzword.

And when we started Zuper, one of the goals that we had was how to leverage machine learning and AI as one of the core components of the platform. So we already started using AI instead of a rules based approach in a bunch of the capabilities that we offered, especially around. Scheduling and dispatching like you are aware, scheduling and dispatching is one of the area where a back office persona like a dispatcher spends numerous hours to make sure that they are able to schedule and dispatch the right person at the right place.

And it leverages a lot of different rules, if you will, like skill sets, location proximity, customer preference, and so forth. The engine that we built for dispatching was already leveraging AI from the beginning. And our goal was to have an AI assisted dispatch engine for automated dispatching. But now in the last year or so, like you mentioned, AI has become the buzzword.

AI is foundational to technology. And there is a humongous shift in Software industry. Every organization now needs to think about a I and including a I in every possible aspect of the platform and not just the external offering of the platform, but even internally how products are getting built.

So from an organization perspective, we have adopted a I in two different ways. We're using a I internally to build products, to create contents and to drive that end to end framework of product building and release. From a product perspective, we are now including AI in three different aspects. One is AI for back office operations.

We offer all these different functionalities around scheduling and dispatching, our AI engine that was there that has evolved now with Gen AI. And we are offering capabilities of, smart and intelligent dispatching as part of that. And the engine has just grown over time. And with Gen AI, it's getting better every day as the model is getting more powerful.

We are also adding a bunch of capabilities around an AI powered call center for the back office with AI responder and an AI scoring system that enables businesses to handle outside business hour calls with AI and also to provide a coach for their CSRs and dispatchers to improve their efficiency and productivity.

Jack Carr: So yeah, operator in loop type. Exactly. Wonderful. 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, so we are a multi-product company and multi-tier In our pricing model, we have the base foundational tier, which offers core capabilities around fuel service management, job profitability, inventory management, asset management, payroll processing and payroll integrations, core CRM capabilities and so forth.

Then we have ZuperPay, which is our payment processing capability that we just announced. ZuperFleet, which is our fleet management capability that we announced. And on top of this, we are offering, workflow automations. with a Zapier like experience that allows businesses to drag and drop create, workflows for automation.

Jack Carr: That's really interesting. 

Anand Subbaraj: And then the AI layer on top that allows AI agents, AI bodies, AI, apps that can be deployed on top. And our goal is to really offer AI as A complimentary capability or AI to augment the human persona that are using the platform. I mentioned about the back office capabilities.

We also offer AI agents to improve the efficiency and productivity of the technicians. Technicians are doing a lot of mundane, repeated, work on the field other than, performing work that are complex. AI is not going to clean the gutter. AI is not going to fix kitchen faucets.

AI is not going to repair the machine, but AI is going to augment and help technicians to improve productivity and efficiency. And we are driving a lot of improvements on productivity and efficiency of the technicians with an AI agent that complements that. 

John Wilson: One of the benefits of working with Wilson is that we are basically a same day, next day company.

So what that means is if I sell a job today, I'm going to aim to get it in today, tomorrow or the next day. Like we aim for a really fast turnaround. And because of that, we have pretty high expectations of our suppliers. Getting parts in time has been a real challenge and SupplyHouse. com has been a really awesome partner for us.

They've got a quarter of a million SKUs. They've got it across plumbing, HVAC, and electrical. So they cover all our different lines. And they can get stuff to you fast. Plus on top of that, they have best in class pricing and their new trademaster program gives you free shipping, free returns, and a bunch of discounts over retail on top of it.

And the trademaster program is free to join. So check out supply house. com. Make sure to check out their trademaster program. 

Jack Carr: Do you feel that you guys have a, an advantage or an edge because you have the history with Microsoft and have the history with, you, for example, you're not going out there and hiring developers, I'm sure you are, but you're hiring developers, but coming from somebody who, Has already hired developers in this field who already has experience with machine learning going into this and building these kind of similar products, but already integrated into Zuper.

Whereas if you were to go with a third party, most of the time, I'm just going to pick on service Titan for a second here, just cause they're the big player. They've had to either buy a company who's done that to integrate it or they just API and integrate it, whereas you guys are keeping it all under the Zuper umbrella.

Anand Subbaraj: Absolutely. So the way we have been thinking about the AI is that we have, knowledge and expertise within the team. It was there already for several years because we started using AI much earlier. As and when we started, we decided that AI needs to be the foundation of everything that we are building.

One of the differentiations that we have is the data that we have collected so far. Now, the way I think about AI is there are companies that are coming in who are just providing a wrapper on open AI or, existing models. And they are just an AI wrapper company. And, it's very easy to replicate such a thing.

And then there are AI native companies that are leveraging historical data and a lot of data sets that are domain specific and using the data set and the history that They have already with equipments with machines to be able to customize a language model. And our goal is to create these industry specific language models and to train the model with our data to offer differentiated experience to our customers.

And that is our forte. And we continue to evolve our existing knowledge of AI augmented with the language models that are out there. 

Jack Carr: As someone working on the forefront of all this, where, do you see or where can you speak about where the direction of this is going in the future?

How do you view Zuper As someone on the forefront of this technology, you can obviously, assume that this speed at which everything's accelerating on the AI front has been absolutely ridiculous. I feel like I can't keep up, but as somebody in the industry, where do you see this going?

What's the direction? 

Anand Subbaraj: I think from a service organization's perspective. AI is going to revolutionize and disrupt the industry big time. There are going to be new age AI first field service management or CRM products coming in. And existing players like us, who has been using AI for a while, will continue to evolve at a rapid pace to offer unprecedented capabilities to our customers.

And I think from a disruption perspective, field service is going to become more efficient. Now, if most of the cases, especially when it deals with after sales repair, field service management is all about when there's a repair, somebody gets called in, hustling to fix and make sure that things are up and running again.

And in case of machineries and, especially critical machinery like an MRI machine or other medical equipments, the downtime is extremely crucial for the industry can be life threatening for someone. And with the advancements of AI, the world is going to move from repair based focus to more predictive and outcome based model.

AI Is going to help organizations transform from this left to right from being, prescriptive to predictive toe outcome based. That is going to be one area where AI Is going to have huge disruption. The other area, like I mentioned, it is going to help the end customers significantly with chat bots and other experience that are going to come in.

The end customer is going to have access to data in real time. Thank you. Like never before. And third is the entire operational experience end to end. We'll get to autonomous field service management. This was not thought possible a few years back, 

A lot of the mundane, repeated work is going to be automatically done by the AI agents. And humans are supposed to do only more complex operations and get upscale. 

Jack Carr: I will be very excited for that day. That's the dream. That's really interesting. And so could you explain just for me what outcome based means for say a home service industry.

So we'll just pick one that's not me roofing. Could you give an example of something that it would do to showcase that? 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah. So I'll pick, I think, home appliance repair, that would be, a good example for outcome based.

Think of a situation where you're buying this refrigerator or a washing machine from some company. Now, what happens currently is that when there is a repair, you need to call someone, they come in, they fix the issue. That is the current prescriptive or repair based model where when an event happens or an incident happens, A call is required to this company.

They dispatch someone, they come in and they fix it. And while they are doing the fix, they figure out what kind of parts or equipments are needed. Now, what is going to happen from here is that a lot of these companies are going to have IOT enabled devices or appliances where they would be automatically collecting a lot of data.

Once they start collecting the data, they would be processing this data at scale using AI and machine learning to figure out when. An issue can happen and when they're figuring out when an issue can happen, they can proactively dispatch a technician to ensure that the issue can be resolved or they can remotely resolve the issue as part of their annual maintenance plan or as part of the contract that you may have with this business.

Now that is predictive. Now from the predictive, as businesses start to master the predictive flow, collecting the data, synthesizing and harmonizing the data, they would get into an outcome-based model where they are committing to a three nine SLA or a four nine SLA of the refrigerator or the appliance.

And they're going to commit to saying that this refrigerator cannot be down more than 20 minutes in a year. To make that happen, they need to get to a model where they are mastering the entire scheme of gathering the data, processing the data. Knowing when things can fail, preventing that from happening by remote monitoring and remote diagnostics and giving you the outcome based approach where you can have the peace of mind that this machine or this equipment is not going to fail more than 20 minutes in a year.

Jack Carr: Yeah, and the, reactive fix is always more expensive, more time, exhaustive. it's an interesting theory because logically it makes sense, right? But in adoption, it's one of those, items that I know I asked you for extremely hypothetical, so I'm not going to sit here and argue with your hypothetical.

It's just, I'm always trying to chew on, that because, right? That's the way that the industries are going with the smart meters for plumbing to find leaks, the smart AC. I think it's actually called smart AC, to, watch when the AC goes down. And I think, There's a gentleman, who's building thermostats that do the exact same thing, like the Nest, where once they see issues, they have a quick button to call whoever installed it.

And so in theory, it makes sense in practice, the adoption seems to be harder than, it actually is. Doesn't mean that it isn't going that direction, though. 

Anand Subbaraj: agree with you totally. a lot of times when we are talking to the CIOs of the organization, they want to get from reactive to outcome based.

But when they try to, look back at the challenges that they have, They are, still struggling in the reactive scenario itself. So for them to get to outcome based model, it is going to take several years. Because they first have to master the reactive based workflows. Only when they do that, then they can go into predictive and prescriptive to outcome based models.

So totally agree with you that, this is in theory, but Gen AI and some of the AI advancements are putting this on the right track. So at some point in time in the future, that may happen. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. For my, what, when you're talking about all this, I was in, facilities and, equipment maintenance for a very long time.

My time before HVAC jack was all for fortune 500 companies. Long assembly lines and exactly what you're talking about and I'm thinking oh my gosh I haven't even considered this because you're right Like I can't imagine the amount of change that's happening there because that was the goal back then was to keep you know We're trying to keep our lines less than an hour down per year and you do this preventative maintenance on this schedule in this schedule and now with all that wrapped in AI and all the Predictiveness that you could actually do now that is that's incredible to think about.

Okay, but super is starting to integrate some of those aspects into its business itself, right? 

Anand Subbaraj: Absolutely. And our goal is to continue evolving our AI journey and fast track, the AI capabilities as part of the platform. 

Every feature will have an AI aspect to it, an AI element to it, and we'll have the AI apps. agents and AI bodies for all the persona that we serve. 

Jack Carr: if somebody else told me that I would just think, Hey, this guy's throwing around buzzwords. But with you, I actually think that's an accurate description right there.

Very, cool. So one of the questions that I wanted to ask you earlier, because you said, you talked about the organization being 200 people, worldwide, and your, massive growth and, your next steps are, these really large next steps, did you raise, what does that look like for you right now?

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, we are a Series B company. We raised about 46 million so far from some of the largest VCs. Our lead investor is Fuze. They are based out of Seattle. It was started by a bunch of entrepreneurs and amazing venture capitalists from the Seattle area, including John Connors, who was the former CFO and CIO at Microsoft.

So fantastic organization. We love collaborating with them. 

Jack Carr: We also, just a small in there, 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah. So we also have, Sequoia capital as one of the investors. we also have raised money from HubSpot and Zendesk. 

Jack Carr: And so you've raised all this money, you're building this great team, you're building this amazing product.

What does the next, when I'm talking with a company that has to do with anything in AI, I try not to extend out over a year just because it, the, the amount of growth is, absolutely phenomenal. what's in the next year for you? What does that look like? What's any big, feature drops or anything that's coming that you really want to talk about?

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah. We are innovating at a massive pace. We release features every week and we continue to do that at the pace, that, we need to go after because. field service is a crowded space. There are large players like ServiceTitan and others. And our goal is to quickly get up to speed with some of the capabilities that are required to serve the trades that we are targeting along with enterprise field service.

And by the end of this year, Our goal is to have the breadth of the capability along with the new products that we are launching in a state where we can scale this up further. And then the AI story is the big milestone this year where we are bringing in all these new AI capabilities to serve our customers.

But our focus this year is truly on AI. We launched Zu ai. And Zu AI is this agent tech, AI capability to have all these AI agents for the personas that I men mentioned, and we'll continue to build AI capabilities at a rapid pace where every month, like this month, we are releasing about five capabilities on ai.

Next month, there are a bunch of others coming in. And like I said, by the end of this year, we'll not release a non AI feature. Everything is going to be an AI specific AI powered feature. 

Jack Carr: I'm curious what takes up your day to day, right? maybe you're out raising more or talking to investors or building leadership or talking to your leadership team.

Like, where do you find yourself spending most of your day to day? 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah. So as a CEO, I feel that I have three core responsibilities. Number one, I need to make sure that there is enough money in the bank. Second, hiring the right team. And third is, working on the most critical challenge and the most critical opportunity. At this point in time, the most critical challenge and the opportunities are AI. 

Jack Carr: I was just going to ask you, most critical challenge and opportunity for you. That makes sense. 

Anand Subbaraj: What I really like doing is talking to customers. I spend a lot of time working with customers almost on a monthly basis. I'm traveling to meet customers.

being out on the field with technicians, understanding what technicians are doing. And I just love doing that, working closely with customers and creating that customer obsessed culture in the organization. 

Jack Carr: Do you think that transcends running a tech company, but do you think that most of our listeners here, they own businesses or they aspire to own businesses?

From that leadership perspective, do you think that customer centric focus is a key to any business or specifically for just your business? 

Anand Subbaraj: No, I think the customer focus and the customer obsession is a mandatory requirements. It's a non-negotiable for any business. It does not matter whether this is a software business or otherwise.

Every business needs to have that customer centric view. And as an organization, we made it a point that we are going to do a customer backward approach, wherein every decisions and actions that we are making, it's going to be a customer first approach. We are going to put the customer in forefront of these decisions.

And usually, this is a top down approach. It cannot be bottoms up. And we are creating that culture where right from me being super customer focused and customer obsessed, it just trickles down to the rest of the organization. 

Jack Carr: Yeah, that speaks volumes for your organization that you're actually going out and traveling and visiting customers and talking to them and doing workshops.

It's a very interesting perspective because as an owner, me as an owner. 

Is there any, anything besides just going and talking to customers? Maybe a framework that you rely on to make sure that you guys are customer centric. 

Anand Subbaraj: There are three core things that we try to do. One is understanding the use case and requirements of the customers.

So when we are building the feature, we ensure that even before we are releasing the feature, we research with customers. We show what we are trying to do with the customers to ensure that this is a customer first approach. And we do not want to ever release a feature without first evaluating that and talking to the customers.

Second is to have a framework such that Any new feature that comes in, it can be enabled and disabled for any customers. So we do not release features just like that for all customers. Every feature has a flag so that it can be enabled or disabled for a particular customer. And we leverage that to scale things up really quickly when things work.

But when things do not work, we are not releasing to everyone to create more issues. And the third important item is this method of build, measure, learn, repeat. we are building, we have a lot of events and signals coming in from all the channels to measure the success of what we are building. We are learning from the data that we are collecting, and we are repeating, the same process again.

So we continue to iterate, continue to build, continue to learn and repeat. 

Jack Carr: Anand, this has been a absolutely wonderful discussion. I'm very interested in Zuper. I'm probably going to book a demo with you guys after this because this sounds, really neat. Where can people book those demos?

Where would you like to send people to? 

Anand Subbaraj: Yeah, great question. Thank you for asking that. our website is zuper. co. It's not com. It's zuper. It's z u p e r. co. you can also follow us on LinkedIn and social media.

You can reach out to me. I like talking to prospects and customers. 

Jack Carr: Very cool. Thank you for spending the time today. This has been eye opening. I always love being on the forefront of this kind of technology. It's very, exciting. and it has been great talking with you.

So if you like what you heard today, you heard the man, you can go over to zuper. co to sign up for your demo and subscribe to owned and operated. And we'll see you next time.