Digital Transformation – Borya Shakhnovich, airSlate

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Tech strong TV. I've got the new company founder CEO to introduce you to here.

Well, it's not a new company per se. It's new to our audience. His name is boria.

Which is kind of a Russian shortening of Boris Bora shakanovich, and I hopefully didn't mangle it too bad. But Bora you you Sally better than I What is technology? Yes very nice to be here.

Thank you for inviting me and you pleasure to make your acquaintance. Thank you. It's a pleasure.

So Bora, you know. We should start off with a little bit about you and then a little bit about your company. Sure.

So I am an accidental entrepreneur. I was I was educated as a scientist. I did my PhD in Boston University and bioinformatics and then I became a professor there and then moved over to Harvard and started my first company which was called.

I am scientist, which was a professional Network for researchers in 2008 after I left Academia that didn't work great, you know idea to change the world but a really bad business and then in 2011, I joined the founder of the at that time called PDF filler that was a product and that was a company that was doing a cloud-based PDF editing Solutions. And when I joined it was just one person and we bootstrapped it over the next four years from 2012 to 2016 and to about 16 million dollars in revenue and 130 people and At our first round of financing a series a from General Catalyst and that was the beginning of the sort of the future growth of the company and the transformation of the company from a single Product Company to a multi-product portfolio company aimed at process automation middle office automation business Automation in general and that's when we bought a company called sign now, which was a need signature solution over the next couple of years. We also built our Flagship product called air slate, which is really a no-code RPA solution for automating business processes and integrating them into Cloud systems of record and ever since then we've been growing and so now we are a thousand people serving over a million customers everybody from Mom and Pop shops to To Fortune 500 companies many Fortune 500 companies they use our products and we continue to grow and innovate and you know add to the portfolio of products.

We also added recently US legal forms, which is the largest the library of legal forms and documents and and other products as well with the aim of building an end to end solution that allows non-technical users to be able to essentially create it light solutions that you know is the is the life blood of the business which is business processes user interface design customer relationships and back office Integrations. What a great story man. Congratulations to you.

Yeah, that's excellent, you know. Just want to make sure people out here don't get confused because you mentioned a few different products the official name of the company now though. Is there Slater?

It's PDF filler. No, it's so the official name of the company is air Slade and it has five products PDF filler sign now air slate US legal and and then a couple of other ones but yeah, these are the four major products. com and then started Security Boulevard, which was always my passion and background anyway in cyber, then we container general for cloud native and digital cxl.

And so we have all of these Brands and we were known as media Ops then I started this TV show here called TECO video show. It's not really TV in a tech strong TV and Went through the whole thing and you might have had a similar thing. We hire the fancy Silicon Valley Agency to try to get your branding right because you have all these different products and they were supposed to we paid them, you know to come up with a new name for the Corp and they said you already have a great name text strong use that for the whole thing.

So we wound up this text truck but It's funny, you know when you grow organically a bit like that these things happen and you have Acquisitions on top. It's a great story though. The other thing though in listening to abora is Right you you happened.

It sounds like you guys were in the right place at the right time for a couple of different sort of macro. Trends would you helped enable and and in turn probably put wind in your sales right one was this. Oh no code low code thing right people wanting to get test on that.

I didn't have to go. Hire a software development team and you know take a year or nine months to build an application that I'm gonna update and upgrade it. You know, I want to make it happen.

Now I want to you know it so no code low code is certainly a huge kind of wave that you guys are riding. The other thing is just the whole transference of Paper to digital you want to call that digital transformation? Right?

It's funny. I forgot if it's on LinkedIn. Yes, there is someone put up a meme it was that old manila envelope.

Remember the old manila envelopes with the tides and there was like lines and you would say, okay, it went from Warrior to Allen and I would cross out boys name and I would write the next person I'm sending it to right and that was interoffice Communications Circa 1986, right and think about where we are now. I mean you Empower that. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean look, I I think that a lot of the great it companies that have been built over the last 40 years have been built on business process automation, you know Erp companies Microsoft build their business on top of that in a very large respect sap, you know oracle a lot of those companies have built huge conglomerates on top of the notion that the data that flows inside of the company is the lifeblood of the company and needs to be not only stored and retrieved but also computed also analyzed also made useful and a bunch of other things like that and that I think is the primary value proposition for a lot of the things that drive those digital Transformations and and then the other part like you said, you know, I think that Automation and is a large part of what's driving digital transformation as well, right? I mean like I think that Be as a macro economy always strive to be more efficient and automation is the basis for that efficiency. Right?

I mean efficiency comes from Automation. And so I think that a lot of the things that people used to do very manually to your point like read addressing manila envelopes and other things like that are woefully inefficient, not only because they're slow but because there's a lot of like there's a lot of opportunities from mistakes and I think that digitization of those processes both decrease the number of mistakes and increase the speed of the actual data transfer and then finally, I think if you look at the Arc of Technology overall, I think that things have been going in the same direction in that, you know, using the technology becomes easier and easier, right? So like before there used to be a Punch Cards afterwards, there's these very complicated languages like assembly then they're easier languages, but still we're very complicated like C and then people went into Other kind of scripting languages like PHP and other things like that and what that does is it increases the number of people that have access to technology and that can do that technology and I think the no code movement is a lot about that.

It's the democratization of technology in the same way that's been happening over the last 50 years that allows many more people to participate in the technology Revolution and not only participate but also benefit from it in that they themselves become much more valuable as part of that economy and valuable not only to their to themselves but also to their employers and so I think a lot of the mission of the company is about that democratization of Technology, especially in the middle office and for white collar workers that allows them to create much more value per unit time than they otherwise wouldn't be able to do without the tools and platforms that we provide. A great, you know that we we hear the term citizen developer. Right applied a lot to this low-code no code space where look people want to get something done tools, like yours allow them to quickly create something that that gets it done.

You know course I I started five six companies of my time as well. So some did well some didn't do so well. One of the things I vote and I've been involved in the VC world and help VCS, you know with their portfolios and one of the things I always hear from entrepreneurs is you know, our biggest competitors is spreadsheet.

Right. You probably heard that from people too right out. Right, there's no other thing that does exactly what we do people are using spreadsheets.

It doesn't work in your case though. That's really the fact isn't it? I mean probably your biggest competitor, you know, especially in the mid mid small business line is it's spreadsheets.

I mean, I think it's paper. It's spreadsheets. Frankly.

I think that that's a little bit. I'm not sure whether I agree with all of that. I think my biggest competitor is laziness frankly.

Yeah, you know, I I think it's the inertia of not wanting to do anything and I think that A lot of the the reason for why change happens slower than we expect is because people are resistant to change right? I mean, they don't want to do things that are different and so you have to wait until a new generation is born before and that that actually figure out how to do things the right way from the beginning and then it becomes the wrong way to do for the next generation. And so and so on and goes right and I think that that on a lot of ways is our competition and and also, you know, I think our competition is a lot of the sort of top down solutions that that is I think you know outdated in a lot of ways in a way that people introduce technology and I think this product LED growth idea that that people have been very successful at over the last five to ten years, which has been enabled by a lot of the internet and directed consumer kind of ambition models has really changed the game in that a lot of the products now have to stand on their own not on the shoulders of salespeople and salespeople and sales machines, but really on the value that the products that provide themselves and the quality of the products themselves, and I think that that's going to do wonders for the it community over the end and technology in general over the next decade where I think that the the moat is going to be the community of people that know your products that know how to use them that know how to gain benefit from it rather than a go to market which is very dependent on these, you know, sort of corporate sales processes where the whole Corporation has to I has to implement a certain product rather than the Of the product decides whether that product is good for them or not.

100% you know what Boris Williams we're gonna go so over here. We had a great conversation, but I need to talk about your company a little bit. You guys recently announced some funding.

Share with us. 5 million dollars recently from g-squared and from my UI path and the UI path partnership is an interesting partnership because uipath actually created a VC form specific VCR arm. Sorry specifically in order to make this.

Investment and one of the reasons for why that is is because the missions of the two companies so similar in that what they want to do is, you know sort of empowerment of the middle office through Automation and that is exactly our mission as well. And I think that we very much compliment each other from a product and from from the perspective of products in that dissolution's that they provide in the solutions that we provide oftentimes combine to create outstanding automation Solutions and business and so we're really excited about that partnership in general. excellent And this 51 million Rays is most recent race was done at a unicorn valuation for the company.

Yeah. Those billion dollar valuation sure. Excellent.

Congratulations again on that look we could do the usual questions about what you're going to use the money for it, but I think we know the answers, right? You're gonna Do more products? Expensive marketing and help grow this business.

I'm wondering the words you don't worry that I really wanted to buy there. Is that new Ferrari? I think I think the UI people may have a problem with that but it's okay.

Hey, it's your life. We're only friends. Yeah, you know I but I I read there's an article in the times yesterday funding over this past quarter for Tech startups was down I think 23% which is the sizeable number right 20.

Probably the biggest drop since they said 2019. And part of it is look with covid. It was just so much money being thrown at things a little bit.

I think we'll all agree. Some valuations were probably a little out of line. And and so we're seeing this sort of Correction if you will.

But you know. 50 million dollars is a healthy raise and then a post billion dollar valuation as well. You know it.

People don't write checks for nothing. I don't care what time of it is in the economy. So congratulations.

I'd love to have you come back on talk more. Maybe I had a I had a blast. And we'd love to have you love to have you on hey, man.

Congratulations. You know what there's a lot of people out there watching this saying that's what I want to be. But that's what I want to do.

So good for you man. Thank you. We're gonna take a break here on Tech strong TV.

We'll be right back.