Raj Sarkar, CloudBees | DevOps World 2023

This is Techron tv. I have a great pleasure being joined by a new, well, you've been ACMO, but a new CMO with CloudBees Raj Slacker. Welcome.

I'm excited to be here, to be talking to you, Mitch. Yeah, I'm thanks for the invitation. Well, abs, and I'm excited to be kind of the first insider to get a little, a little scoop.

Not not scoop in a news way, but get an idea of, it's always interesting talking with leaders when they're entering, entering a new position Yeah. At a new company because there's a reason why you took the role. Right?

Right. Why did you decide to change, or you were looking, this is the right place. Um, so, but before we get into any of that, tell us about you, your background.

Yes. The kind of things you've done, and you know, why the CMO role is something you really love to do. Yes, yes.

So I am one of those rare specimens who is an engineer turn marketeer. I always, It does happen. I heard that.

I heard about This. Okay. I always tell this joke that I moved to the rack side because I was an engineer once and I used to make fun of the marketeer.

I don't know what those marketing people do. Uh, but what happened is when I was, uh, at my, a company called a Network Equipment Technologies, I don't know if you've heard about them. They were one of the founders of the ATM Forum.

Mm-Hmm. Uh, the word on the street is they were actually going to acquire Cisco in the 1990s. Oh, Interesting.

There you go. Yeah. That, that, that would've been interesting.

That would've changed things a little bit. I know, I know. So I was a technical lead, uh, in, in engineering team and the pro, the PM left, and my boss is like, Hey, you need to now do a dual job of Tech Lead and pm And, you know, when I started doing the PM job, like talking to customers, talking to partners, I really enjoyed that.

I didn't envision myself like sitting in a cubicle at, at least at that time. Mm-Hmm. Uh, for the rest of my life.

And I decided to go to, you know, grad school, uh, get a degree in business and then move to marketing. So that's how my journey into marketing started Ing. You made it out of the cube, got exposed to some customer.

It is really cool. I mean, when you get, get a chance to talk to people that either will or are using the things that you create and insights that comes with that. Okay.

So why CMO? Why, why, why marketing? Why is that such an appeal to you?

You know, initially when I started my career in marketing, I didn't envision myself to be staying in marketing for long. But one of the things I really started enjoying in marketing is I think I get to use both sides of my brain equally, the left side of my brain, which is the analytical part of the brain and the right side of the brain, which is the creative part of the, you know, Mm-Hmm. Brand.

Early on in my marketing career, I was more on the product marketing side. So I did a lot of, you know, messaging, storytelling and things like that. And later on in my career, especially at Atlassian and one password, I really started enjoying like the brand and the creative side of marketing.

We did a lot of fun stuff with, for example, Bitbucket, one of the product I worked on Trello. Trello, did an incredible job, runs Our company. Yeah.

It's amazing. And the one password, um, I don't know if you've watched, uh, the commercial, we did a commercial with Ryan Reynolds and then Ryan Reynolds' first commercial tech commercial was basically with one password. I did not know that.

I've not seen it. Yeah. And it's a security company.

Uh, and the idea was like, how do you make security accessible to the masters, because security is such a complex topic in itself. But anyway, to answer your question, this is why I'm still in marketing is because I have, you know, enjoy both the analytical side of that side of marketing. So here's the challenge.

If you can get Ryan Reynolds to do a Deadpool commercial at CloudBees, that's something that taken it tough. Another level. Love Deadpool.

So, so, um, you know, you've, you've been evaluating options and you're considering going to CloudBees. You know, CloudBees is a known entity, been around, you know Yeah. With Jenkins and CloudBees.

Why was this the right pl right move, or the right pla? Why now is the, this is the right place for you to be? Right.

Right. I think the first and foremost thing for me was important for me to go company, which is a Wellknown brand. Right.

And I was telling Heidi this, uh, my marketing team about this here. When I was at Atlassian, we used to talk about CloudBees all the time. Oh, did you really?

Yeah. Interesting. Like, because I worked on Bamboo, I worked in Bitbucket, and we were like, let's look at what CloudBees is doing in the enterprise space.

We need to learn about that. Right. So I was cloud Visa is one of those companies, which is a pretty well known, established brand as a marketeer.

Like that's super, super important to me. And number two, I wanted to get back into dev tools. I also have this philosophy is given what's going on in the market, dev tools is like recession proof, right?

People are, if you go and talk to CIOs and CFOs, they're cutting budget on sales and marketing tools, but they're not cutting budget on dev tools. Developer product productivity is a topic of conversation, uh, for any CIO or VP of engineering. And I think that CloudBees is, you know, well positioned right now, uh, because it has its foot in two worlds at the same time.

One is the Jenkins world. If you go talk to majority of the enterprise developers, they still use Jenkins. Jenkins is not going anywhere.

Mm-Hmm. And then the new cloud platform, which makes me super, super excited about it, which goes into, you know, the cloud native, you know, like the cloud native space. Uh, so that is what was attractive for me personally, for cloud reason.

This is why I'm here. Mm-Hmm. Interesting.

You don't wanna stick around for one, for, uh, for, uh, passkey and making that, you know, reality. I mean, hey, you Know, that's an interesting Conversation. It's a great thing that's finally, It's, it's, it's gonna, it's, it's, uh, it know, people have been talking about how, like, we can go into that password conversation if you're interested, because that is something I'm very passionate about as well.

We will talk about, it's like very similar analogy to Jenkins, right? Hey, passwords is gonna go away. Right.

Everyone is talking about it, like passwords is gonna go away, but I believe that's like 20 or 30 years out. Yeah. It's not gonna change.

It's not gonna change overnight. Yeah. Right.

It's the same, it's the same thing with Jenkins. Like, people have been talking about, oh, I don't think Jenkins is like, even like five years back, I've heard people say, Hey, Jenkins is not gonna be, you know, gone. But look at it.

Look at the, look at the data is Vibrant as ever. Right. And it's, I I think Jenkins is gonna be this same thing with SCUs is this new, new interesting technology, which everyone wants to talk about, but we'll see how long, like, how long before they industry move be.

It's very cool stuff. Yeah. Um, so sometimes you come into a role, it's like, eh, things ain't going so well.

We need new leadership. We need to refresh things. We need to rethink.

We're gonna need to, you know, we've got some problems here. We need the right person to come in. Sometimes you come into a role and it's like, you know, it's not broken.

It's actually going pretty well. Um, I was just talking with Shana Med, I think it's pretty done a pretty damn good job of balancing CPO and Right. CMO.

I don't know how he did it. I don't know how he did it either. And I know it wasn't easy.

At least he said, he said it hasn't. Yeah. You know, it seems like, so you're, you're, you know, more falling into the camp, that camp, I assume.

But that's a different strategy when you walk in, you know, day one. Hi, I am the new CMO. Let's chat about, you know, what, what do you do?

What's your first a hundred days to figure out Yeah. What you're gonna, what you're gonna bring to the table that Yeah. I have, I've split it into 30 days.

Uh, so my first 30 days focus is primarily to understand the product and our customers, because I don't think I can device or my team can, like my team already knows, but I'm coming into this space like new, uh, as a newbie. So I need to spend the first 30 days like learning about the product and customer. To your point, I don't know what's working or what's not working.

This is, there is a perception among, you know, if you go and talk to the sales team, they will give you a different perspective on marketing. If you go and go to engineering, they will give a different perspective on marketing. My goal is for the first 30 days, is basically be a fly.

I, I said to Sean, I'm gonna be the fly in the wall. I'm gonna shadow him for the first 30 days and just follow and see how he works with the team. I think it's super important for me to understand like what the culture of the team has been.

And it's always very, you know, abrupt when, you know, an old CMO goes away and a new CMO comes on board, and the new CO starts acting as the new CMO for zero. Right. We're changing things.

This is where we're Going. I want it to be like, before I do anything, I, I want to understand like what is working and what, what's not working. And from my opinion of, you know, what needs to happen in the next mm-Hmm.

You know, 12 months after that, 30 days that next 30 days is gonna where I will spend a lot of time with my, with the marketing organization trying to understand like what the team has been doing. I think I'll be better informed than to have that conversation because I would have a good understanding of the product. I'm guessing 30 days should give me a good understanding of the product, given an engineer myself.

Mm-Hmm. Uh, and then, you know, I, I want to get on AQC call as well, like trying to understand what the customer paper and then shadow Sean, and then I'll think about, you know, what needs to happen. And I think the timing works really, really well as well.

Because if you think about from now until 60 days, it's the end of the year. Right. And then we go into 2024.

It's true. It is a good time. And, and you gotta hit the ground running pretty quick there.

I have to, you don't have to wait till June to make an impact. I have To. So, um, why do, why do Cloud Beasts choose you?

Why, why were you the right person to come into this role? I will tell you, uh, there are three things which are I think, very unique about my background, which is a good fit for CloudBees. First and foremost is I come from an engineering background, right.

And what that has done for me is I've generally gravitated towards dev tools as a result. Like I was the first PMM on AWSI was the first PMM on Google Cloud platform, the G ccp. Uh, and then I was hired by last, it was on dev tools.

Yeah. Looked at M that was early days, you know? Right.

You know, all the Bamboo s Babi, crucible, those were things I used way back in the day. Yeah. Yes.

And then on, uh, you know, last two my roles, one is Prisma cloud, the other one is one possible both security is also very tech tech heavy. Yeah. So I think that perspective of business and engineering is a kind of unique, and I think as, as you all know, this is a very technical, CICD is a very technical space in general.

So that's number one. The number two, you keep hearing this term, PLG and sales, you call it SLG or sales led growth, right? Mm-Hmm.

Sales led growth is how enterprise marketing has worked for like, almost 20, 30 years. Um, Traditional enterprise sales model, You know, and, and then PLG is the new, you know, new kind of GTM motion, which kind of, you can see Atlassian was, well, like one of the founding fathers of it. Right.

So if you look at my background, you know, I have worked in companies which are purely sales led motions, Cisco, right? Palo Alto Networks. Mm-Hmm.

Uh, and then Atlassian was purely product-led growth. I'd say my Google and one password experience was kind of a hybrid. So I think that's the second thing, which is very unique.

Uh, you know about my background, which is a good fit for lobbies. Mm-Hmm. Interesting.

How about, um, you know, I, I've played, uh, CTO and CIO roles and one of the interesting conversation is, Mar, when a new marketing lead comes in CMO, 'cause there there was a time when it was like, CMO is gonna be the technologist of the company, and we don't need, you know, that always ha whatever it is, we always say, need that person. We always need a more, in the end, how, how do you plan to work with engineering and the tech, it and the technical organizations? We obviously, you know, you can come up to speed on what they're doing.

You know, you've got the background to understand what's going on. Maybe you have some insights about security. You might be able to help with supply chain security, but you're the marketing guy.

You know, why you don't be telling us how to do our job. How do you, how do you build that relationship that trust? You know, I'm not here to tell you what to do, but let's start, let's work together and stuff.

I tell us Like, this is where the customer first approach really, really works, right? Like, it's not by intuition. Like whatever feedback I have to give to the, you know, the product and engineering organization has to be based on two things.

One is data, and number two is customers. So that's the only way I will be able to influence, you know, product and engineering. Obviously, like, you know, usually CMOs with non-engineering backgrounds have to remain on the surface because they cannot go deep.

Yeah. And I feel like I should be able to go a little bit deeper because I have personally like, you know, use CICD in my engineering life. Uh, so that would help as well.

But to your point, you are absolutely right. Uh, like why would, you know, uh, product and engineering listen to, you know, the c the CMO, it's not A traditional strength, let's put it that way. 'cause I've been little tension there.

Yeah. What it's, it is Kind of changing a little bit because if you, if I look at like Atlassian and Google, I think Atlassian, especially like marketing had a huge seat on the table. Because remember, there was no sales counterpart at Atlassian, right?

Well, That product led organization. Yes, exactly. Product like growth.

So last question is, um, have you been given any kind of a mission or, um, here's your, here's what we want you to accomplish from the board or the CEO, or, you know, I imagine they're not just letting you turn loose to see what you're gonna do. They might have asked you to accomplish something. Have you been set revenue with that?

Okay. That's the most important thing for the company, right? Like revenue, uh, how, how should we grow our business in the next 12 to 24 months?

I think that is what like focuses rule of 40 is the other thing you'll keep hearing from an revenue and rule of 40. Those are the two most important things for the companies right now. Now, everything will stem off from there in itself, but those are the two important things I think the board will care about.

I think that's what our needs, the CEO is gonna care about. That's what me the CM O is gonna care about as well. Is it meeting the trajectory that we're on?

Or are you being asked to, we need, we need you to help us get it to the next level. Get it to the next level. Okay.

Yeah. That was a dumb question, but I, I had to ask it. Of course they are.

Okay. Uh, what do you, what do you what? I do have another question.

I mean, uh, so if you project forward, let's say, let's say two years from now, and let's say you have helped bend the curve and, and that has happened. What, what do you think will be the, a coup one of the main reasons why that has happened? It's kind of, you look back at yourself to today and say, that was the right decision I made or, or set of decisions I made that helped us get there.

Yeah. I, I, like, I have formulated my opinions right now about the market, but I don't, I I think it's too premature for me to share it. Well, we can, you know, like put this, you know, in the, in the vault for two years and bring it out two years.

See what you said, I, I can target a high level what I see how, you know, the B two B marketing or the enterprise marketing landscape is changing and how CloudBees can be on the forefront of it. Right? The first and foremost thing I always talk about this is, you know, people forget, like the enterprise buyers 20 years ago, and the enterprise buyers right now has changed drastically, right?

Like you and I, we are the Facebook and the TikTok generation, right? But we are the enterprise buyers at the same time, right? Mm-Hmm.

So whatever we of communication happened 20 years ago, that same thing is not gonna work right now. I think, uh, B two B companies need to have conversation with enterprise buyers almost like a human. So I see that shift happening in the marketplace, like how you communicate.

You see that already some of the companies trying to do like Slack, the drop boxes of the world. So I think that's the number one shift. You know, I think, uh, you will see in B two B marketing, and I want cloud news to be on the forefront of it.

The number two thing is this whole concept of PLG or SLG, it's always a pendulum, right? Mm-Hmm. Either you sell to the CIO or cx or the enterprise buyer, or you sell to the user, right?

No one has successfully figured out how you can use both the motions and get into, uh, you know, an enterprise customer. And I feel like you'll see that change. A lot of companies trying to do both at the same time.

And I think CloudBees is uniquely positioned because we have one product, which is purely an enterprise driven motion right now. And then the cloud native platform can be, you know, a bottom up motion at the same time. So I think figuring it out, how to, you know, use those together, I think is gonna, you know, make hobbies, I think a good, successful, uh, company, you know, two, two years from now.

Okay. Uh, third last question. Uh, do you, you, this idea, you're talking about, you know, sales versus product led, and is there a balance or what's gonna happen?

Has derel run its course? I mean, some people are saying economic conditions, tighten budget, a lot more scrutiny on dollars. Devereux isn't what it was when it was, you know, money was a lot easier to flow and buy stuff.

Do you think that model is still, you know, alive and well, and we're gonna keep doing that? Or you think it's gonna change to something else? No, you can.

So this is, I have a very strong opinion about this. I think in order for an enterprise company to be successful in, in the dev tools space, you have to win the hearts and minds of the developers and the way you win the hearts and minds of the developers. You need people who understand the developer.

Mm-Hmm. Derel plays a huge role in every single dev tools company, like Dev Tools, product I worked in Google had a very strong, you know, dere team you just saw today. Mm-Hmm.

Uh, I think in one of the, uh, panel there was someone from Google, right? Yeah. A couple people.

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Uh, Atlassian was a huge investor in Devereux early on because we understood it. Like, in order for our products like Bitbucket and Jira to be successful, we need, you know, Devereux people. There are now what skillset is needed is kind of changing, shifting a little bit right now.

Like to, you kind of, you got, there was a few topics around this, like this whole concept of platform engineering and how it's not just about the, you know, uh, it's not just about how the whole, uh, developer, um, what do you call it, experience, developer experience, but it's also security is coming into the picture right now, right? You need to figure it out. Like, you need to have an understanding of containers and Kubernetes, right?

So the skillset is kind of changing to some extent. It's becoming more and more complex, but I don't see de like going anywhere. It's still gonna be here.

I'm glad to hear that. My opinion is you're not gonna take that away. That's not happening.

They're gonna be like, yeah, take your sales person away. I'll tell you what we need to buy. Right.

All right, Raj, I don't, I I have a fourth last question, but I won't ask it. We'll save a pretty outta Time. You really enjoyed the conversation.

Yes, I have. And I hope you'll come back again. I wish you all the best in your new role.

And, uh, congratulations. Thank you. You're joining a great team.

I know, you know, I know a lot of people at, uh, CloudBees and admire all, all, all and what, what they've accomplished, and I'm excited to see where, where they go next. So, awesome. Excited as well.

Thank you. All righty. Ra Kar and, uh, new cm of freshly minted right off the press, right off the assembly line.

Here he is arriving at CloudBees. Thanks for taking the time to meet.