Ajoy Krishnamoorthy Transcript
Clint Betts
Ajoy, thank you so much for coming on the show, it means a lot to have you on here. You are the CEO of Cin7, you recently acquired a company called Inventoro, which is an AI-driven sales forecasting provider, which I want to talk about. But can you tell me about how you became the CEO of Cin7, and the whole journey of where you are today?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Okay, awesome. Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Clint, excited to be part of this, and good day to all of your listeners as well. My journey: I've been a software product guy all my professional life. Right now, I'm at Cin7; as you said, I joined Microsoft and spent about ten years working on some of the technical products, .NET and Visual Studio. These are essentially tools and languages developers around the world use to build applications like Cin7. So, that was my, I guess, cup of tea; I spent a lot of time in that domain; I've written half a dozen books on that. I'm not saying that to brag about it, but to illustrate, I got really deep in that-
Clint Betts
That's incredible. You should brag about that; that's a big deal.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yeah, deep into that space. No, but if you calculate the time spent on writing and rewriting, I think authoring a technical book pays lower than minimum wage, so probably not a great ROI from an economical standpoint, but the gratification you get from having published and shared some of that stuff, it's worth a lot more than that. I spent the first half of my ten years at Microsoft in that technical role and then shifted into more of the business and the strategy, engaging with customers and partners, and really grew a lot in that space. That kind of got me understanding the other side of the business, so to speak. It's one thing to build a product and the technical stuff behind it, but what do you think about the customer pain point and the partner strategy? How do the partners think about the products?
So, really got me good exposure to it, and then I left Microsoft after being there ten years and joined a startup called Acumatica; it was a startup back then, and we built a cloud ERP, ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, boring back office software, if you want to think about that way. But supercritical. If ERP goes down, customers are really upset. So, we spent a lot of time thinking about customer business processes and the data; how do we make sure customers can benefit from it? So, I did that for about eight years; when I left Acumatica, I was the executive VP of product and chief strategy officer.
It really gave me a lot of chance to understand the nuances of the different industries and what their business needs are from an application standpoint, and that's what set me up for this role at Cin7. When people ask me, I always say that Microsoft is my second graduate school, and Acumatica is my trade school. We put a lot of learnings into practice; we had to really build a lot of things from the ground up. So, I'm here at Cin7. I've been here for about 18 months. 15 of those 18 months, I was the chief product officer, looking at our product offering, and then recently took on as a CEO.
Clint Betts
So, it's a cloud-based inventory management software company, tell us use cases. Who are your customers? How do you get customers?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yep. So, our customers are essentially anybody who sells a product. So, if you've gone to Amazon and ordered... And who doesn't these days? Everybody. So, those product sellers are essentially looking at ways to keep track of how many orders they are selling, in what timeframe, and what we need to get done to ship it in a timely manner. Do I have enough stock? What's my holiday going to [inaudible 00:03:51]? Do I need to get the replenishment done so I have enough stock to go sell that? All the way down to companies that actually sell online and in a retail store, with the point of sale systems. Companies that sell primarily to wholesalers, we have a lot of customers that sell to big retail outlets, hospitals, hotels, and so on, so a lot of the B2B is what it's called.
And then, also manufacturers, companies that produce their goods, produce as in they could just be doing simple assembly and then ship it. For example, a customer can buy 1000 shampoos and 1000 conditioners and create a bundle that's like two shampoos, two conditioners bundle. So, that's assembly, right? And the customers that do full-on manufacturing either do made-to-stock or made-to-order. Whether they're producing cosmetics, apparel, or furniture... All of those customers, all of those industries rely on a system like Cin7, which offers that 360 view, if you will.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Well, it has changed over the years. So, the reason now that I've got older kids, before my life was centered around the family, and my kids, and whatnot, so now I'm an empty nester, so it's a little different schedule. Again, I would start by saying that I'm sure you've heard others say this as well: there's no typical day, and that's true. We are such a global organization; we have employees and offices in six countries and employees in eight or so countries. So, there's always a little bit of a dynamic nature to the day because sometimes you start pretty early with talking to folks from other regions, and then you end the late-night calls with folks in New Zealand, Dubai, Sri Lanka, and India. So, there's lots of variability. For me, the foundational thing is I... We'll probably talk more about this.
As a CEO, I obviously have to let go of my CPO thing as well. I am still a product guy at heart, so I think about products a lot. There is not a week that goes by without me playing in the product; that's super important to me. And so, my day typically consists of lots of meetings, and most of them, I'll tell you, we are super, super good at this; I don't go to meetings just to be there and listen. If I had to learn something and listen, yes, that's great, but if I don't have anything to contribute or to take away, I typically do not show up to those meetings. And that's something that we are trying to get everybody to feel comfortable about. So, a lot of our meetings are very productive. There are meetings that we run, and in fact, my COO has actually done a great job [inaudible 00:06:23].
There are meetings that we run that we tag them as inform only. We're not expecting you to come and participate, but we want to inform you of some topics. It's super important for all of you [inaudible 00:06:33], whether it's five people or the 500 people, we just do this very specifically. But in other meetings, we expect people to collaborate and solve whatever we are trying to solve. So, a lot of meetings vary depending on the audience; I've got meetings with my team members and my leadership team, and I tend to meet with the customer on average once a week. Some weeks, it's more than that, so if I don't go talk to a customer in a week, that's usually a pretty odd week for me. And that's super important; we cannot be living in a vacuum, engaging with customers, understanding how they're using the product, what the pain point is, all that is super, super important.
Clint Betts
And so, how do you decide where to spend your time each day? You get into the office, and you've got all these meetings, but as CEO, there's so many things that are thrown at you, so many things you can work on. I guess what I'm asking is, how do you prioritize your day?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yeah. There's no great answer; I am not here to tell you that I've figured it out. Okay? And naturally, I'm super organized with things that I care about. And I say it that way because I'm also super unorganized about things that I actually couldn't care less. And if you talked to my wife and kids, they'll tell you they'll have a list ready. But the things that I care about, innately, are super organized. Simple things, like people always say, "Man, you seem to be working a lot." I actually don't, but I'm very responsive; that's something that I carry pretty seriously. So, responding to things, when people reach out to me, I take it super seriously, and if I have a response, if I see it, I have no reason to put it on hold. Whether it's text, Slack, or email, if I have time, I'm looking at it, and Clint sent me a note saying, Ajoy, can you be on this podcast?
If I have an answer, I'll say, yes, I am, or I'm like, Clint, I cannot commit to it; I'll tell you in a week. So, I think that helps me stay on top of things, which is number one. Number two, I'm a practitioner, not a preacher. So, for me, it's super important to know things. So, I tend to learn, and it's a crazy thing to strike a balance because you don't want to get into a micromanaging situation, but at the same time, you don't want to be too disconnected from what's going on in the business. So, for me, the prioritization, there's no magic formula; it's about things that matter to you, things that you think are going to drive impact to the business, to the customers, to the partners; I try to prioritize them over anything else. Naturally, the day gets organized like that. My EA does a great job of making sure those meetings are prioritized over other conversations. Then, the same thing happened in terms of my time spent.
One of the things I'm also learning, Clint, is that this is my first time as a CEO, and I'm three months in, so I'm not here to say I've figured it all out; one of the things one of my mentors recently told me is, it's important that you as a CEO, stop thinking about today a lot. Start thinking about tomorrow and the future. You don't want to be always running; what's next? What's next? What's next? You have to think about the future. What are we doing in two or three years? What are we going to be from an industry standpoint and a customer standpoint? So, I tend to block out and spend some time reading about stuff that's happening in the industry and so on.
Clint Betts
What reading recommendations would you have for us? Aside from your books, we'll put those in the links before, but what reading recommendations would you have for us? What does a typical reading week, month, or day look like for you?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yeah. My books are pretty dated; I don't think anybody should be buying them, so if you really want it, please go for it, but I don't think... The technology has changed so much since those came out. It's a mix of things; I don't have any specific podcasts that I follow or newsletters that I read vigorously. There are a few, but it's not something that I go back and watch and listen to and read. One of the things that I actually said is that I don't know if it's super common now, but social media, actually, there are so many good things to learn about. I follow a lot of folks on Twitter, and there are so many things going on that keep me up to date with what's happening at the latest and greatest. In our business, like our customers, I told you about this, Clint, the industry is far and wide.
We have customers in fashion and apparel; we have customers in beauty and cosmetics; and we have customers in food and beverage. So, I follow some of those clients' accounts, too, and influencers in those areas to understand what is happening there. What are some of the key innovations that are going on? I just want to have that understanding at the forefront of my mind. I read books; I actually never read one book; I read many books. Maybe it has to do with my attention span. So, I usually get a couple of books that I'm reading at the same time. Right now, I'm actually reading something very finance-oriented, largely because my kids have been influencing me super much, very much in that direction. So, I'm reading this book called Caesars Palace Coup, which is about the big takeover that happened between Caesars management and Apollo. I'm just two chapters in. It's fascinating stuff on the leveraged buyout and so on.
And I'm also getting through a book called More Money Than God. It's super fascinating to understand the inner workings of all that. So, that's what I'm reading. I wouldn't recommend that to anybody, and [inaudible 00:11:50] was asking me as we were preparing, we were talking about the books, that a couple of the books that I really recommend to people, when they come in and say, hey, what would you recommend? One of them is a book called Crucial Conversations. I don't know if you have heard about it; read it-
Clint Betts
Oh yeah.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
It's a really fascinating book. I actually use it as a reference manual. I have probably bought ten copies, and I've given them to friends and family. Maybe there's a subtle message there. But it's such an important book; it constantly reminds me of a lot of stuff in terms of how we think about conversations and the perspectives we need to have. So, that's one good book. Then the other couple that I usually refer to people is Shoe Dog. This is Phil Knight's book, Nike's founder. It is a really fascinating book; there's so much anybody and everybody can learn from it. The third book is by Bob Iger. I'm not a big fan of him, but the book, The Ride of a Lifetime.
It is a really fascinating book; there are a couple of good examples of leadership transition and trying to get people to do what you want to do without overly coming on top of it and saying, I am the CEO; you will do this. How do you change that mindset and get people to buy into your idea so they can execute it with a lot of passion? So, there are lots of good takeaways from books like that.
Clint Betts
How are you thinking about artificial intelligence, and how are you integrating that into your company? I'm sure that that's been a big topic for your company and for your customers, investors, clients... Literally everyone in the world-
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Everyone.
Clint Betts
... over the past two to three years, and even beyond that. How are you thinking about it?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Absolutely. So, there's so much hype about AI, Clint, right? Everybody talks about it, and I think, to some extent, I think a lot of companies, especially technology companies, are a little too crazy about calling everything AI. So, the way we think about this is... In fact, we're going to publish a paper on this, and I'm going to cover this in one of the keynotes that I'm doing in a month or so. We think about this, and we call it AI with purpose. It's not just... Technology, for the sake of technology, it's actually not that exciting. I get carried away with tech, too. Of course, guilty as charged. But when you think about taking AI and putting it into action, we are thinking about what it means for our customers. What are those killer use cases that actually benefit from AI, or even machine learning, that we can derive value for our customers?
So, one of the things we talked about is that it's true for the supply chain industry, and it's true for us. I use this term to mean we are data-rich and insights-poor. The data is good, but data alone doesn't cut it; it's so noisy. How do I get the signal that I need to know? It's like, think about this: when you're driving in a car, if the dashboard shows every metric that you can possibly get from the car, oh, your cooling fluid does this, your car temperature is this, your gas tank is this, your tire inflation is this... You'll be super distracted. The main thing you want to know is, hey, how fast am I going? That's a key insight that you're super, super important.
When you come to a point where you park the car, you want to know that the car is parked, or you actually break. What is that important insight you need to know at the time with the context and the intent? So, that's the challenge we're trying to tackle, and that's why we actually mentioned this at the beginning, we acquired a company called Inventoro, and the thesis behind that acquisition is exactly this. Let's look at use cases that matter to our customers, and let's figure out if there is a technology, a solution, or AI that can help us with that.
Clint Betts
In your opinion, what are the three most necessary traits for a leader to possess in order to be successful?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Oh wow. Great question. One, I think, is being a good listener. You don't want to come at a mindset of like, yeah, I got this figured out. So, I think that's super important. Second, for me, like I said earlier, practice what you preach. In fact, practice more than you preach. And that's super important. Otherwise, you get super disconnected from what the reality is; you don't understand what the customer's pain points are. I think that's important. The third thing that I hold true to my art is related to the practice comment; it's like no task is too small, and no task is too big. Just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you're not doing a sales call, you're not getting on a support conversation, and you're dealing with customer escalation.
And I honestly say that you know what? That's not just true for leaders; in fact, I ask about this type of stuff in interviewing candidates coming into Cin7 or any recruitment I've done. What is people's approach towards tasks? You don't want to be saying, hey, I will only do these things, I won't do that, it's beneath me. Or no, I'm actually scared; I won't go in front of the board and talk about it. We don't need to be; all tasks can be accomplished by us as long as we have the passion and the desire to do them. So, those are the three that I would say are, at least, the way I think about it from the current place.
Clint Betts
What do you know now that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
How much time you got? Well, I think there are a couple of things, right? So, one of them is, I always say this, and I hold this principle close to my heart, and this is something that I learned along the way, which is, it's 10% what happens, 90% how you react to it. It's easy to look at: oh my gosh, there's a bug in the product, or we had a support issue, or we lost the deal, or whatever. Stuff happens, guys; that's why we are in the job that we are in. It's 10% what happened; it's 90% how you react. And that is super... It's very, very hard; in fact, we were dealing with an escalation last week, and I was reminding myself, Ajoy, stop, you don't need to be in a spin mode; you don't need to go run around crazy, you don't need to [inaudible 00:17:32]. Be thoughtful. What happened is what happened; now, what do we do?
I think it's super important; I know it probably sounds common sense, but sometimes that's where we fail; we don't think about it this way, we just get carried away in the moment. I think that's one of the key lessons, and that's why I don't get stressed a lot. Not that I never get stressed, but it takes... Things that I don't have control over are usually very hard for me to get stressed, but I only get stressed when I feel like I could have done something differently, and I'm not doing it. And this attitude of it's 10% what happened, 90% how you react to it, helps me keep things in perspective. There is something bigger than what we are doing. And it's okay. Let's learn from it, react positively, and get everybody back on track as soon as possible.
Clint Betts
What are some products, apps, tools, and things like that that you use every single day without which you couldn't live?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yeah, I'm a big fan of, like I said, Twitter. I read a lot both on the sports front and [inaudible 00:18:33] on the business commercial side of things. We use a lot of products from a collaboration perspective; I'm a big fan of OneNote. The product has got a lot of. It's not the best greatest product ever, but going back to my comment about being organized, I actually have notes for every conversation that I've had. It's very cryptic, so people probably can't understand what I'm typing, but I try to take some bullets, not transcribing everything. But what are the key takeaways? What are the things that I need to follow up on? To your early question, there's so much going on, and the context switching is also super, super obvious, and happens a lot during the day, from sales to marketing to engineering to product and this.
So, that keeps me organized. One of the things that I've been working on since I became a CEO is to make sure I meet with every employee in the company. So, I'm almost 90% way there. So, I keep, essentially, a note of the employees that I met in the last 90 days, and when I meet in the team, and I recognize them on stuff that they shared with me, that really makes someone's day, and I think it's super good to connect with people at that level. So, I use OneNote a lot, obviously all the boring business tools, I'm on Zoom a lot, and I like Slack; we use Slack for collaborations, so we use that a lot. So, those are some of the common tools.
Clint Betts
How do you stay grounded? How do you maintain your mental health?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Stay grounded and spend time with your kids. They'll tell you how stupid you are sometimes, and they're super honest about it, too. And no, I'm fortunate; I've got a great relationship with my kids, and we spend a lot of time talking about business and whatnot. Right from when they were very young, when they were like five, and we drove back from school, I asked them, "How was school today?" They go, "Good." And I go, okay, that's not the response... When they asked me how work was, I could tell them, "Yeah, today it wasn't great; I had this conflict, and I couldn't figure it out." And my wife would be like, "Why are you doing this?" "Well, they asked me a question; I want to give them the answer." And that extended on, that helped me build a great relationship, and they'll tell you, right? It's the honesty that keeps you grounded, in my opinion.
It's that, and then it's honestly the practitioner mentality that I talked about that helps you understand what you don't know as well. When you try to put yourself in a sales conversation, in a product conversation, or working with engineers on stuff, you understand how much you need to learn and go forward with. So, I think that's super important for all of us; it doesn't matter what level you are in or what your title is. Title: in the long scheme of things, it doesn't matter. It's like how much energy and support system you have built along the way. From a mental health perspective, as I said, I'm generally a very optimistic person; I dream big a lot, and it's very hard for me to fall asleep because I'm always thinking about ten things that I can change. And I think that's a great motivator, and it keeps you driving all the time.
I'm also a people person, so the COVID, staying working from home was a bit of a hard thing for me. And we ended up actually traveling a lot during COVID. We are one of those families that took all the measures, but we traveled responsibly and did a lot of outdoor camping. And when obviously it was okay to do. So to me, I think spending time with people and that's why I travel a lot, I go spend time with people. I work from Seattle, and we have offices, like I said, in many different locations; I go spend time with them. Whenever I'm traveling, meeting with my team, the energy that I've derived from it, the meetings that I have with our customers, the positivity that they share, the potential their business has, and how much they derive value from Cin7, all of that fires me up.
Clint Betts
What are you thinking about the current macroeconomic environment and our current... We're obviously in a political environment. As we talk, there's actually a first presidential debate happening tonight.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Right.
Clint Betts
How are you feeling just about the state of the world from a macroeconomic perspective? Because you have to think about those types of things now as CEO, even beyond just what's happening inside of your company.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Oh, 100%, it's super important because we have to make some responsible decisions about growth, people, and all that stuff. So, we are constantly talking about all of those topics. There is a bit of obvious: how can he not miss this whole big doom and gloom, right? Inflation is this, interest rate is that, and all that. There is definitely a shift in the way customers... When we think about Cin7 as a business, we are one of those companies that were fortunate, but we were also positioned; the previous team did a great job of getting the company ready, and the team, as we came out of the COVID initial phase, there was a big push with retail and commerce. We all went through this transition of ordering everything online, buying online, picking up in-store, curbside pickup, and delivering at the door, all the fun stuff.
And that drove a lot of business, and we were super, super successful with that. And then, as we did the transition, it kind of came back to normalcy in 2023. That means customers are taking a little bit longer time to make the decision, their buying cycle is different, and their buying behavior is different. So, we've already factored a lot of that into our modeling, and in 2024, particularly given its election year, there is always a bit of uncertainty. But what I can tell you, Clint, like I said, is that I spend a lot of time with our customers. Some of our customers are startups. These are that add a great idea: hey, I've got this phenomenal idea for co-creating jewelry, and I'm going to start off doing it from my garage; I have success; now I'm opening up my store, a Shopify store, I'm selling on Amazon, Etsy, fair, whatever.
And then we have customers that actually have already found the product market fit, companies that actually do an amazing startup, and then boom, now they're selling like 5, 10, 15, $20 million worth of product. And then we have customers that have accelerated, they have scale, they're doing $50 million, $100 million dollars, $200 million in revenue. The common team that I hear from all of them, even to date, like I was just talking to a customer last week, every consistently, I would say 95% plus of those customers, none of them tells me that the business is going to shrink this year, the business is going to be slowing down next year. They come out and tell me, I think we're going to double our business by the end of the year; we're going to have three times growth next year. You wouldn't believe there are some customer conversations that I walk out thinking I'm ready to punch the wall.
I'm like, come on, show it to me. Give me, I'm ready. It's amazing to see that these are folks with a lot of resiliency, grit, and passion for what they do, and that's what drives me. To answer your question about how you keep motivating yourself, our platform enables that. We have customers that come in at a really early stage to Cin7, at $2 million, less than a million dollars in revenue, and then they grow up to become a brand 50, 60, $100 million, seeing that it's phenomenal. There is no other happiness in life than watching our customers succeed using our platform. Knowing we played a small role in their success, I think that's great. So, back to the macro climate, yes, there is macro slowness, there is some doom and gloom, but in reality, there's a lot of positivity, there's a lot of optimism, and that's what we are driving towards.
Clint Betts
I love that. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at Ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Yeah. Actually, I got a chance from many people. I talked about my career progression. I was a technical guy, or actually, in more of a technical product role, and I shifted into more of the business and strategy. So, the leader and the manager who took a chance there opened up opportunities for me. I wouldn't be here today without that bet. If that manager looked at me and said, no, you're a technical guy; I don't think you can do this job of interacting with partners and defining programs that are on a massive global scale, my path would've been completely different. The appreciation and the understanding that I built in that role made a huge difference to what I am. So, that's one. The second is when I got my MBA... I went to the Ohio State University; I'm a big Buckeye fan, OH, for any Buckeye fans out there.
During that journey, I had several professors, and one of them particularly helped me understand the numbers behind the stories. And I love telling stories, but the numbers are super important, too. And that's where I think, honestly, today, I think of myself as a product guy, but I'm a very sales-driven, numbers-focused product guy. I want to make sure we build a product that our customers will appreciate and understand, not something we just build because it's fancy and cool. So, those are two examples where somebody didn't have to, they didn't have to take a bet, they didn't have to spend the extra hours and time, and they did, and that's...
At that point in time, you don't realize it; that's the beauty of all of this. When that happens, you go like, yeah, cool, thank you so much, thanks for taking the time, and you walk away. But then you look back from 5, 10, 15 years, and you go like, my gosh, that was a fork in the road, and they helped you take the right path. And you are where you are as a destination because of that smaller investment that somebody made with you.
Clint Betts
Ajoy, what a pleasure to talk to you. Congratulations on everything you're doing. I'm blown away by it. And you're an incredible leader, and thank you for spending the time with us.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, great questions, I loved it. Now, I want to go listen to some of your other CEO interviews to see what they said.
Clint Betts
Perfect. I love it. Okay. Thank you so much.
Ajoy Krishnamoorthy
All right, take care. Bye.
Edited for readability.