Sanish Mondkar Transcript
Clint Betts
Sanish, thank you so much for coming on the show. Honored to meet you, honored to have you here. You are the CEO of Legion Technologies, tell us how you got there.
Sanish Mondkar
Yeah, so I'll start by just telling what Legion does, and then we'll talk about how I got here. So, Legion, we serve existing frontline workers and the companies that hire them. So we built this platform that is called workforce management. So workforce management basically helps labor-intensive industries better manage their labor force, which typically consists of hourly workers in industries like retail, hospitality, healthcare, and manufacturing. So basically, service-oriented and labor-intensive industries.
From an employee standpoint, Legion provides them experience, greater experience, and greater satisfaction in doing these jobs by enabling them to get better schedules, modern experience through mobile apps, and get paid instantly after the shift is over, so these steps of capabilities. I got here because my background is in enterprise software, so I've been using some version of enterprise software for well over 20 years at this point. Prior to founding Legion, I was the chief product officer at SAP.
Prior to that, I was chief product officer at a company called Ariba, which was bought by SAP back almost, well, a little over ten years ago. So, in my journey of building enterprise software platforms and applications, one of the things that happened after I left SAP was that I was just fascinated by how little technology and innovation are helping advance the nature of the jobs and the experiences of the employees that we see every day. All of us are interacting with frontline workers in some shape or form, whether it's at grocery stores, cafés, restaurants, or retail stores, but they're using very archaic and obsolete ways.
There is not much that's improved in their fundamental experience for decades. As a technologist and a product builder, initially, I was drawn to the question of why that is the case. That curiosity, over a period of time, turned into a calling, a passion, and a really deep motivation to solve that problem. So that's how I got here. We are now eight years into the journey, and I feel as strongly as I did on day one, and yeah, it's been great.
Clint Betts
That's awesome. What did you learn at SAP? Were you there when Bill McDermott was CEO?
Sanish Mondkar
Absolutely. I was there when Bill McDermott was the CEO, and he was actually responsible for the acquisition of Ariba, and yeah, so pretty much that period of time.
Clint Betts
That's very cool. And you recently raised 50 million in a growth round. What was that process like? Tell us how you got to a point where you're like, "Hey, let's really throw some gas on this fire."
Sanish Mondkar
Yeah, so I think this is, like any companies, I would imagine other companies that are in Legion's stage, it's a process of figuring out what your [inaudible 00:04:01] of value, and then figuring out how do you get the product to as many customers as possible? Along the way, there are these inflection points where you feel like you could use more capital to go faster, or do better, or whatever the case might be. Legion is at a point where we feel like going global, serving markets in more countries, and serving our customers better by just doing more of what we are doing...
So we built [inaudible 00:04:33] product market fit, and we feel like what we have is working. It is a matter of now, of course, doing that better, so there are continuous improvement elements to it, but also doing that on a bigger and broader scale. So that was the realization we had some time last year. Then, we paused for the right timing to raise a round because there were all these interesting things going on last year with the banking crisis and things of that nature. So we did our round. We initiated that late last year, and we completed it in the second quarter of this year.
Clint Betts
Oh, that's incredible. And so what's the idea here? How do you grow this thing even more?
Sanish Mondkar
Yeah, so if you think about what we do fundamentally, we are a platform that shows both employees and employers. That is our value proposition, and that is what employers want, that is what employees want. There is a lot of common ground which has not really been explored in workforce management platforms before. They were very much oriented towards the labor efficiency and cost control, which are very important goals, but they're very employer-centric.
And when you over-index on that, employee experiences suffer, and the turnover in these industries is very, very high. We wanted to achieve the right balancing act. So that's been the message, that's been the product capabilities. Now, when you take a step back, you can sort of just quickly come to the conclusion, do just basic math, that actually, it's a very broad problem statement. This balanced perspective of managing labor applies to all labor-intensive industries.
We are talking about retail, with 30 plus million workers in the US; we're talking about healthcare and manufacturing, with each one of them 12 to 15 million workers. We're talking about the service industry and the financial industry. There are basically somewhere between 75 to 80 million hourly workers in the US. Serving these labor-intensive industries, when you take a step back even further, there are over 2 billion hourly workers in the world. So, the problem statement and the headroom to grow here are almost boundless. And so the way we think about it is, of course, we have to grow one step at a time, but each one of those steps can be very meaningful and impactful.
For example, going from retail and hospitality to healthcare would substantially increase our addressable market, which we are in the process of doing right now, or going from predominantly selling to the US-based customers to adding Europe, and that would, again, substantially increase our addressable market. So those are the types of very impactful growth vectors that we think can be unlocked with some investment and, obviously, a lot of execution. So that's how we're sort of mapping out Legion's growth, and as I said, the size of the market and the headroom here is so that we could be sort of doing that one impactful step at a time for a long period of time and continue growing.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Sanish Mondkar
Lots of remote meetings over Zoom. So Legion is a remote-first company. We went basically fully remote after the pandemic, like many others did, and we never looked back. Our goal was, and is, the goal is to not just think about being remote as a phase that we are going through, but we want to really be good at it. We truly believe this is, by and large, the way at least technology work is going to happen in the future. That's what employees want. Now, we've got to figure out how to take the friction points like employee onboarding and other things, and make them work, and improve all those things.
So, back to the question, yes, there are lots of remote meetings over Zoom. I try to divide my week into sort of the time spent over four categories. One is, of course, sales/growth, followed by its product, product innovation, and technology. Third is customers, so existing customers, meeting our customer sponsors, and building a relationship with them. Last but definitely not least, we are trying to recruit people, employees, and candidates. So these are sort of how I bucket my week and the time, and I'm one of those people who color-codes the meeting calendar, and everything is sort of organized. In addition to that, I'm very disciplined about working out every day and taking care of my health. I think everybody should do that. That is the most important thing you've got. So those are the main things that I spend time on in a day.
Clint Betts
How are you thinking about artificial intelligence?
Sanish Mondkar
You know, I'm sure you've heard this: people talk about it as over-hyped in the near term and under-hyped in the long term. I truly believe that with artificial intelligence. So, just taking a step back, Legion was founded with the... We had two fundamental goals of where we wanted to evolve workforce management. One was to make it more employee-centric, as I talked about the balance. The other is to automate workforce management using data. So, in our customer organizations, workforce management is a critical platform that is used every single day. So to schedule employees, to capture time, you can imagine it is like a daily operational and mission-critical platform.
Well, it's also a great candidate to fully automate. If you are going to do the same thing over and over, it's not a high-value thing to do manually, repeat the same things, and spend time doing the same things over and over again. So we aspired, this was our founding thesis, we aspired to fully automate workforce management, and we had to, from day one, lean a lot on AI. So, in Legion, almost all our customers use AI in some shape or form, whether it is to predict demand. If you're a retailer, knowing how many customers that you have for a particular given day or time would allow you to accurately plan labor.
So, demand forecasting is huge, and we use machine learning and deep learning for that. We schedule optimization, figuring out who the right person is to be placed at the right time based on employee skills and work preferences so both sides are happy. We use some pretty deep adoption of AI. More recently, of course, there has been a lot of focus on generative AI. Generative AI has a unique value proposition for applications like Legion, such as workforce management. Because if you think about it, we predominantly serve desk-less workers. So they're not sitting at a computer, like technology workers or many other types of jobs out there. They're out facing customers, they're out on a factory floor, they're out in distribution centers. So how do they interface with the platform that is workforce management, which is going to assign tasks to them, which they have to mark complete, or it will assign schedules and shifts, and these things are changing all the time, without being in front of the computer? Well, generative AI offers a great step forward by providing a natural language interface that can be mapped to all the complexities of workforce management, business processes, and workflows.
So we think about generative AI as giving that layer of natural language conversations that users of Legion can use to not just interface and get information, like a Q&A type of thing, like a ChatGPT, but also execute actions. A manager can say, "Joe is running late right now. Find a replacement for Joe's shift that starts in 30 minutes," and Legion can take that, map it back to the right actions inside of workforce management, and present some options to the manager, or just go and execute it, depending on what the instruction was. These types of things are now very, very feasible, and we have started to productize them, such as conversational capabilities through Legion's assistants and AI assistants.
So, we are very bullish on AI. We feel like, especially generative AI is the final piece of the puzzle here, which would truly turn workforce management into this conversational intelligence service that you don't have to log in, but you do as a retail worker or as a service worker, or a frontline employee, or a manager, or a district manager, can fully interface and fit that platform, and get a lot of value without learning the platform, or without necessarily engaging with the platform in software, in a conventional software manner.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's actually really interesting. How are you thinking about leadership now? Does leadership change? What are some characteristics and traits of leadership that you think are really important, and will AI affect any of those?
Sanish Mondkar
I think so. I mean, I think when you think about leaders and leadership, I mean, just my philosophy across the board, regardless of what you are leading, whether you are leading a technology company, or a services company, or goods, or software, whatever it might be, there are sort of the three most important things for a leader to have is obviously, first is vision and strategic thinking. You have to know the calculus of how you are navigating your company, your team, your department, or whatever it might be against micro and macro goals. And it's the leader's job to basically have this in their minds, and have a plan for it, and look around the corners, and whatever, however you want to describe it. But that, to me, is vision and strategic thinking. The second thing is emotional intelligence. Knowing the people, knowing the team, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your team, and how do you obviously improve that, but also work with it? That's motivating people and leading them with positive reinforcement.
Last but not least, effective communication. There could be a lot of things that you have in your mind that you need to translate into the right words, whether it's spoken words or written words at the right time, and to get the right output from whether it's your employees, your customers, all of that stuff. If you think about these as the three mainstays of a leadership role, how can AI actually help in all of them? Strategic thinking, whether you like it or not, requires a plan for AI. You have to have a plan for whether you are going to be a user of AI in your organization or a producer of AI power capabilities like we are.
This is something we cannot just be on the sidelines. I don't think anybody at the leadership level can be just watching and not reacting to what's going on right now. At a minimum, you should have a plan for adopting AI in your organization to increase productivity. So that's basically the strategic part of the thinking. But effective communication, we've had internally, at Legion, our goals, for example, content production, like blogs and other things. We have increased our ambition to produce content by 10X because we now have just the productivity tools and have completely gotten rid of things like writer's block and all the things we would sort of sit in front of a computer and stare and say, "Well, what am I going to write a blog about?" Well, you don't have that problem anymore.
And that's just one example: writing code, testing code, and generating test cases. Any type of communication, any type of language, any type of written or computer code, or all these things have already gone through in the last two years of generative AI, early stages of generative AI; I think they've already gone through quantum leaps. Companies and leaders who are going to understand it, take the effort to understand it. You don't need to be an expert in how it works, but you need to really have a point of view on what it's going to do to your organization, your product, or your customers, and have a plan for it. I believe that is pretty important... It's an imperative for leaders now.
Clint Betts
Yeah. What are you reading? What reading recommendations would you have for us?
Sanish Mondkar
My content consumption is sporadic, and blogs. I'm a huge sort of blog reader, and podcasts on 2X speed. I mean, some of these podcasts are like four hours, and I just heard... I didn't go through it, but there was the latest Elon Musk and Lex Fridman was eight and a half hours.
Clint Betts
Yeah, can you believe that?
Sanish Mondkar
That is insane, but I'm sure there's a lot of good stuff in there. So, I learn a lot through podcasts, blogs, and things like that. On the books, I tend to read sort of non-technology books. It just offers me a good outlet to learn things other than what I'm organically learning through my role, my colleagues, and other things. So, most recently, I've been reading about David Sinclair's... It's a longevity book around lifespans, why we age, and the claim of why we don't have to. And so it's a fascinating read about thinking about aging more as a disease than a natural process that everybody has to go through, and just kind of 25% through it, but it's been great so far.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's super [inaudible 00:21:10], actually. That's cool. How do you stay grounded? How do you maintain your mental health?
Sanish Mondkar
As I was saying before, I think one of the most important things for anybody to do, no matter what you're doing, or no matter what your role is, or how important you think your role is, is to find time to take care of your own health. And it's just a matter of good habits, I think. You don't have to necessarily go and spend hours working out and stuff like that, but just doing something every day, at least my take on that, has a bigger impact than probably anything else you could do in terms of taking care of your health. So, to me, the most important thing from a mental health standpoint is just health. I mean, I like working out every day, even if it's like 10 minutes, but I will work out every single day. I do intermittent fasting, I like that for a lot of reasons.
Those are things that, to me, are part of my day, just like having a meal is. It's not a negotiation, it's just something that I will do every single day. That is core to mental health. Other than that, just focus on the things that you can control. Acknowledge the things that you cannot control so you know they're out there; you can see them, but they're not within your control. And so don't waste time stressing over it. And I think just being kind to people around you goes both ways, and it comes back and helps you when you need that kindness back from others. So these are simple things to do in a day.
The hard part about all these things I mentioned is to turn it into a habit that you do consistently, day after day. And I think that is where some work and effort are needed, but it's totally worth it. And I truly speak from my own experiences of the past eight years building Legion; there are more bad days than good days, as any entrepreneur will tell you. And you need something that is grounding for you, which is not actually tied to just your company's accomplishments. And these are sorts of things for me.
Clint Betts
We're talking about a day when the stock market is having a really rough day, and it appears like that might continue for a little bit. What do you think about the macroeconomic environment? Also, obviously, we're in the middle of an election in the United States; there are elections in 20 or 25 countries this year. As you think about macroeconomics and macro in general, what are we looking at here over the next six months to a year?
Sanish Mondkar
Firstly, I would start by saying I wish I knew. The past 18 months have been pretty turbulent in many, many ways, especially when you think about the macro, whether it's financial, political, economic, or even social. And I think that what we are seeing today is that we are far from the turbulence being over, right? Which way it would go and what exactly happened is anybody's guess. But going back to the point I was saying earlier, control what you can. For us at Legion, for me personally, as a leader of Legion, controlling what I can is making sure we are staying focused on the things that we need to do that are in front of us. So we have to build great products, and we have to continue helping our customers who are also going through that same turbulence.
And if we can help them be less worried about how labor will be managed, or if we can help our users, largely the frontline workforce, get a little more satisfaction from the schedules and the experience of working and getting paid instantly after the shift is over, so there is some financial wellness and relief on that part, then we are doing our part in helping both our customers and also advancing the company. So that's how we think about it. So focusing on that is also an antidote to stressing out about other things that we can't help.
I'll also say this, I firmly believe Legion is working on a very durable problem. I mean, we're talking about labor, we're talking about hourly work, we're talking about these labor-intensive industries, which are massive, and they're not going away. And they have seen a lot of financial collapses, and other crises, and things like that, and they're still around. And we all use and love those industries. So the long-term macro, I'm very bullish about, but I do think that the phase of turbulence, we are nowhere close to that being kind of... We don't see the end line on that yet.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right about that. We might just be at the beginning of it. Finally, we end every interview with the exact 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?
Sanish Mondkar
I think there have been many people who gave me a chance. I've always had mentors, I've always had people that I go to for advice, and sometimes they may not know it, but they have actually unlocked a decision or opened a door for me, and so I'm always grateful for that. In Legion's case, specifically in my very early days, when I was really on the fence about how to go about building it and where I should start, Do I start with building software? Should I start working with a customer? Do I start with talking to investors and raising... When I was going through that very, very early phase of Legion, I happened to meet Jacob Jaber, who was the founder and CEO of Philz Coffee, and Philz, and I'd just gone to pitch the idea of Legion to him, and we sat down at their headquarters, back then it was near Dogpatch in San Francisco. And he really loved the idea, and he kind of challenged me on a couple of points. We had a great discussion, and he said, "Hey, if you build it, I will use it." And that was sort of a great... I wasn't expecting that. And then, furthermore, he said, "I'll also help you build it. I'll give you office space upstairs," which was the office, "And I will give you access to my locations, and you can work with the store managers, and work with the baristas, and do your research, and do what you need to do to get off the ground."
And that was extremely impactful. And furthermore, after that, they became our first customer. They rolled out nationwide. I got a lot of feedback from Philz. So I think, specifically for Legion's journey, I think that was pretty instrumental, and I'm very grateful for that.
Clint Betts
Sanish, so great to talk to you. Seriously, congratulations on everything you're doing. You're building an incredible product and incredible company. Would love to have you back on again to talk about it as you progress here. Seriously, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.
Sanish Mondkar
Thank you, would love to be back.
Edited for readability.