Ryan Denehy: Revolutionizing IT With Simplicity and Efficiency at Electric

And so, you know, we were small company, 10, 12 people , uh, you know, and I was the one person who was sort of gifted with the responsibility of making sure people had their laptops and software and, and , and all that good stuff. And then my second company, which was a , a retail analytics business, which I started in 2012, and we grew about four 40 employees there.

And, you know, there was a weekend where I was with my, my head of operations and we were setting up a bunch of Lenovo laptops for our sales team. And I was like, this is such a bad use of my time. as the co-founder of this company to be here on a weekend, like setting up laptops, like the employees are gonna hate me. They're not gonna be set up. Right. I hate myself because I'm not actually doing things to grow the business.

And , uh, and it was funny cuz we were, we were, you know, the company, that company was based in San Francisco and this was, I think around 2013, I remember thinking to myself, okay, I'm in San Francisco, I'm in the, the sort of epicenter of technology and there's no modern it solution. Like no one there aren't 10 venture back companies like trying to, trying to solve this. Every it solution on the market back then was designed for corporate it departments.

But there was nothing for companies that didn't have an it department. And I remember looking at, you know, our finance department and like they had some really neat modern tools. Like we were an early customer of expense buy and I'm like, okay, well beforei you just had like a shoebox full of receipts and an intern like uploading them into the expense oven . Now you have expensive buy and like you, you don't need any of that stuff.

Or, you know , I looked at our HR department, which was one person , um , doing HR 50% of the time. And I'm like the whole reason that we can have one person spending only half their time on it is because we are using benefits and like benefits and essentially automated a lot of the work that would go into payroll and benefits. And then I'm there with a stack of laptops going like, okay , stop everything. Like how does, you know, these benefits were , how does that not exist for it yet ?

And so, you know , I'd had that idea in the back of my head for a while . I was like, I thought every good idea for a software company was taken until I kind of like had that epiphany. However, I had my retail analytics business to run. And so my, my fear was that by the time I exited that business and could actually start electric that there were gonna be 10 other companies doing it.

Fortunately we got a , a phenomenal offer to sell the analytics business to group on at the end of 24 , spent about a year there. And by the time I left, no one had started , uh, this company yet. So I moved to New York and electric was born

And you were in the belly of the beast in San Francisco where you would think that this was such an obvious, you know, a product really. And you know,

what do you think are some of the ways that, you know, even midsize companies can and look at, you know, how to grow or how to, I hate to use the word pivot because it, just, to me, it's just got such a negative connotation, but I think, I think every company has to consistently be looking at, you know, market factors and needs and the way that that business needs are changing and be limb enough to, to flow with that.

Like what , what do , what do consumers want? What do businesses want? How are things changing? You know , I think you can, you can start to sort of surmise like a better way of doing, you know , of doing something.

And like , I think a great example of this in the public markets, for example, would be a company like ServiceNow, you know, ServiceNow under the leadership of their previous CEO, John Donahoe, you know, he was a consumer guy, you know, he had been at , he'd been at PayPal before and you know, his view was enterprises are gonna buy and use more software. Software is gonna be the underpinning of how employees work.

And so therefore we need to build our software to make it easier for all the employees at those companies to work and separately, people who buy our products are increasingly using more and more technology at home. And they want their technology at work to be as easy to use their technology at home right now. Like these are like kind of obvious things. When you hear someone say that you're like, yeah, you want software to be easy to use.

And you want the software that your employees use to like make their lives easier. But in through the lens of a corporate it department, like that was insane. That's not how people thought about those things, but that's how he, that's how he thought about it. You know, now ServiceNow is a 60 or $80 billion , you know, market cap company. And it was just because a guy like John sort of took a step back and said like, well, like what do people care about? What do people want?

And I think it , it , it looks very easy when it's done well. Right? Like good business decisions look inevitable when they're executing. Like obviously, like how else would you do it? Um, you know, but I think it's really easy to get wrapped up in the day to day of managing your business and trying to like come up with incremental improvements to the way you're currently doing things. It's much harder to step out to the day to day and say, well , well , its we're even doing the right things.

Do we even care about the right things for this business?

are going. And so without giving away, you know, your next company, what are , are some of those trends? Where is the puck going in, in, you know, a , a lot of the businesses that we're all thinking about, let's, let's take , uh , you know, my, my, you know, love and passion, which is like, let's say immersive technology. Do you see some opportunities there?

What actually matters is what's the problem you're trying to solve and how are we harnessing new technology to solve it in a better way. Right. And so, you know, I think any business needs to be looking at what the value prop is for their customer and saying, is there a new emerging, you know, or evolving technology that can, you know, that can essentially help us do that better?

You know, a great example would be, I haven't spent a lot of time , uh, in a Tesla, but I was in Texas last week with , um , down at one of our office is down there. One of the guys who works for us has brand new, you know, Tesla model three, I get in there and he's showing off the self-driving mode and I'm, and I looked at that and said , like , that is the first time I've been super impressed by technology in a long time.

And what was interesting about it is it wasn't trying to take over the whole driving experience. It simply, you know, made the active , driving more convenient and safer through the use of really sophisticated technology.

But like when you go by Tesla, they're not promoting computer vision and LIDAR because the average consumer doesn't care about computer vision and LIDAR, they care that they can actually like they can text their friends while they're sitting in traffic and like, you know, not risk getting in an accident.

So sort of a long way of saying like there's so much cool enabling technology out there, but you know what I've tried to do with electric and what I think think more thoughtful CEOs are trying to do is not get too enamored with the technology itself. Just stay focused on the problem that, that technology is gonna help you solve. Yeah.

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It's a extremely important market, but separately, you know, the challenges are somewhat unique. Um, when you compare them to a regular business that has employees, you know, either show up to an office or just sit in their house all day, when you start to think about field workforces, right? You start to think about, you know, large numbers of variable workforces. So, Hey, you've got a bunch of people showing up to, you know, different sites in different places.

And it's not necessarily the same people every day . And you've got some people bringing devices, you know, bringing their own devices from home, other, you know, you know , devices that are owned by the company. And, you know, those things also have to be, you know, monitored and managed and they're gonna be experiencing a wide range of, you know , uh , environmental factors. And it's a , it , it takes all the challenges of a traditional office and us cranks it up to 11.

And so I think, you know, for us building software that can help companies manage their software and their devices in a more effective way, but in a wide range of different conditions. Uh, you know, I think that's what company like ours, which is really building software to automate a lot of what a human do. I think we're, we're better equipped than like the traditional local service provider.

So, you know, for us, we see it as a huge market, an important market and a really exciting challenge to go solve.

So I'd love to hear how that has, has , or has not been kind of a guiding principle for you and in some of your journeys.

So like I'm much more of a sort of creative type than I am, you know, anything resembling, you know, technical or analytical, which I think ultimately has helped me build this company, but also build the two companies that came before it all through the lens of like, we just have to build stuff that works, that makes people's lives easier. We obviously have to have a , a , a business model that is compelling to go along with it.

And we obviously have to have the means to, to deliver the offering , uh, you know, in , in the way that we want to. But, you know, in back in 2016, when, when I started electric, there was this wave of companies that were basically trying to build AI tools, but they were largely founded by these, these technical founders who were so enamored with their ability to build AI technology. And didn't for a second, actually think about the commercial application, right.

And so, you know, without, without naming any names, there were, you know, there was a company that used AI to, you know, schedule appointments on your calendar. There was a company that used AI to, you know, answer question for , um , you know, your HR department and at no point, did anybody take a step back and go, isn't that a solved problem?

Like, can't, I just use Calendarly with no AI and schedule my, my , my appointments more easily, or wouldn't it simple knowledge base suffice for, you know, answering HR questions for, for my team. And so, you know, unfortunately a lot of those companies aren't around anymore. They had very underwhelming exits because the focus was on how neat the technology was and not on what it actually accomplished , uh, you know, for the end user.

And so, you know, when you look at the venture market today, the fact that there's never been an, you know, easier time to raise capital for what it's worth, it's still very hard to raise capital.

It's just less hard , um , you know, than , than it was before , but a lot of companies are getting funded and they're going off and they're tinkering and they're building things and like, that's all well and good, but I do think there's a subset of those companies that are, is getting way too lost on, on the novelty of the technology, not focused enough on, on the benefit for the user.

And , uh, you know, I couldn't be happier that our investors, you know, see what I see in the business, see what our leadership team sees in the business, and, you know, we're able to, to step up and give us the resources to, to keep our foot on the, it

And they were companies that weren't afraid to tackle hard problems, unsexy problems , um, you know, really close friend of mine at the time had started a company called manage by Q , uh, and what they were doing was sort of building the modern operating system for the office. And so they basically, you know, they had, you know, they , they would send an army of people out into the city at night to clean 2000 offices.

It was effectively a janitorial service with software overlaid on top of the whole thing. And then over time, their plan is to sort of, you know, automate the whole stack of everything that wanted office management. Like that's one example of the type of company that getting started in New York back then. And, you know , I remember looking at that going like, no one in San Francisco would ever start a company like that. Right. Like it was, it was operationally complex.

It was in a space that was really, I think, uninteresting for a lot of people. It was, it was a hard problem in ways that, that, you know, technology on its own couldn't solve. And I thought, you know, wow, there's, there's a breed of entrepreneur in New York that is just going after stuff. That's really interesting. And, you know, that's the place that I want to be. And, and , um , you know, so that's, that was the other motivation for, for building the company there.

And, and it worked out really well. You know, we had, I had a really good group of other founders solving, you know, hard problems that were off the beaten path , uh, you know, to , to get advice from in the early days.

And then a lot of our, fortunately a lot of our, our customers who, you know, had to lay people off within six months, started rehiring everybody back.

And then some, and I could never have predicted that we would be in the midst of the type of economic cycle that we're seeing and never could have predicted that this shift to remote and hybrid war was gonna force every business owner and leader of, of, of frankly, any size of company to really rethink their, their, you know, sounds corny sort of digital transformation strategy. Right.

But I think gave people an opportunity to really look at the, the status quo and how you were doing things and reassess, is this the best bank for the buck with this particular vendor? This particular provider is the way we've been doing this thing historically, does that still make sense in the world? You know , uh , for the world we're living in now, you know, for our company, which provides a modern remote first it solution, you know, you can kind of guess how things have gone for us.

Don't get me wrong. It's still hard, right? Like we , it's not like we have customers lining up, you know , uh , or, or writing into the website by the thousands. You know, we , we still have to, you know, get out there and get in front of people and educate people on what's happening. However, there's, there's less friction in the, market's a little more sort of pre-educated to, to the benefits of, of what we're doing.

And I think a lot of other, a lot other software companies that fulfill a real need are , are seeing the same benefit.

The problem is a lot of those local providers, and there are some great ones, but a lot of unfortunately were dependent on showing up to the office a few days a week. They were dependent on the offering kind of being a black box because they, you know, they didn't wanna show their cards and they kind of wanted to keep things to themselves that you had a lot of dependency on, you know, working with them .

And, and , and so I think once , um, you know, who didn't have a critical mass of people showing up to the office anymore, a lot of crush questions were raised of, okay, so what are we really paying for? Or, you know, is this really the best way to deliver, you know, it, if we've got 80% of our, you know, team is, is dispersed across the country. So , um, yeah, it's , it's sort of been an obvious tailwind for us, but I think, I think this style of work is gonna , is gonna be somewhat permanent.

So

So , I mean, so many people, you mentioned Texas, you know, there was the Texas from, you know, particularly California, but also in New York, you know, people flocking to Austin , uh , you know, our show producer moving to Bardos, you know, I think that, I think that people are like, wow, that now I can actually do this. So , uh , yeah, I , I , I think you're right there.

So this kind of brings us to the last question. It's the same question I ask everyone every week is if you could project yourself 20, 25 years in the future, besides, you know, the next, you know , two or three companies that, that you will have built by then , um, you know, if you could bring with you any kind of gadget or service that would just make your life personally better or make you happy, what would it be and what would it do?

Um , again, speaking purely from an economic standpoint, like it's just not good business to ruin the planet. Um, you know, and then obviously sort of socially speaking, like it would be nice to know that someday when I'm no longer on this planet, that it's like not gonna turn into just a total messy fireball. Uh , so that would be my preference.

If I can build such a machine, I'm sure someone's working on it somewhere, but like, that would be, I would , I would sleep a little better at night if , uh , if , if I could do that. All right . Well,