Data Activation with Formstack’s Shawn Jacques

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I got a new guy to introduce you to here.

It's his first time on with us. His name is Sean Jacks. Sean is the SVP of Software engineering at a company called Formstack.

And let's welcome him. Hey Sean, how are you? Thanks for joining us.

I'm doing great. Having a great Thursday and ready to talk some tech, so it's all good. Alright, well you came to the right place then.

Um, Sean, before we talk tech or maybe as part of tech, you know, I always like to let our audience have a little insight into who's talking to 'em. So I mentioned you're SVP of Software Engineering, right? Running, running, uh, I'm assuming, you know, the engineering development team there, but be, give us a sense of your journey, Sean, how did you, how'd you wind up here?

Sure thing. So, way longer ago than I wanna admit, I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, central coast of California. Got a computer science degree.

Spent about 15 years as a developer. I worked at 10 person companies, worked at a thousand person companies, um, did a lot of software development and eventually I got pulled into management. They found out I could talk to people a little bit, started managing teams of developers.

I bounced back and forth between developers, software architect manager several times, you know, but they kept pulling me back in. Uh, and so eventually I went, uh, I was running a 30 person team of engineers at a company called Level. I decided I wanted to go back to engineering, went back to be a senior software developer at Amazon.

Spent about a year doing that, and they're like, Hey, you should manage development teams. I'm like, oh, all right. I guess I'm doing it again.

Uh, and so was a development manager at Amazon for five or six years, five years, and then, uh, went over to mindbody, which was a, um, health and wellness SaaS company and several hundred interviews there. I'm familiar with them actually. I, I have the app.

Ah, you have the app. Perfect. Well, we, I spent, uh, six years at mindbody.

I grew the development team there from 70 people to over 200 people. Lots of fun, interesting tech challenges there. Um, did a replatforming, went from a monolith to microservices, went from on-premise to AWS and a lot of good, good challenges there.

And then for the last couple years I've been at Formstack, which is, uh, process automation, uh, data collection, so forms, documents, signatures, workflows to wrap it, uh, all around that. And then we're on the journey of making a new platform that's coming out later this year around kind of full process automation and data security and how to pull those two things together. That's an interesting, that's an interesting journey, you know, with the mind body, what I, what I discovered in using, and I've been using it now probably a couple years, is a lot of the providers, and I don't mean software people, I mean like, whether it's a my haircut or a salon my wife goes to or, or something, a yogurt studio or, you know, they all use MINDBODY as their schedule or basically as their book.

Yeah. Right. And that's how you engage with these folks.

And because they don't have the assets to build something like that, or a single yoga studio or a single, you know, uh, haircut, a barbershop or whatever you wanna call it. And, um, you know, having a mind body out there is a solution to them is, is a godsend. So it's good stuff.

Now, as it relates to Formstack though, you know, process automation BPA and and stuff like this, not much going on there recently. Is there, Sean? I mean, yeah.

This is a, a market that's kind of being turned on its head with AI and, and some of the, you know, capabilities that they bring to the table. Yeah. And that's, you know, where we've been really fortunate, you know, we had all of that kind of base level forms, docs, workflows that I talked about, and we made an acquisition middle of last year of a company called Open Raven that did data discovery, data security.

And, uh, it was a natural path to bring those two things together and say, okay, we've got all of this data collection and workflow and process over here. We've got data security and discovery over here. How do we marry those two into a solution that lets our customers really, you know, do their magic, right?

Our, you know, our goal is to automate the mundane so that that toil and that, you know, just stuff you have to get done is taken care of so that you can go do the rest of your work, whatever that is. Whether that's, you know, in MINDBODY's case it was making people healthy with gyms or, you know, making people beautiful at spots and salons at Formstack, it's more generic. We can do that for anybody, whether that's helping healthcare professionals service more people or helping, um, lawyers get to more clients or helping people that are applying to colleges, making that super easy and error free.

So we're kind of broadening that spread and letting anybody take the tools we build to make whatever job they're trying to do. Very simple and easy. I Love it.

Let's talk about your customers though. Like, you know, I mentioned the MINDBODY thing and it was clear who the customer, who your customer was there, and then I was the customer of your customer. Yeah.

Formstack who's who, who, who are the customers? You know, who, who uses this? Sure.

So anyone in a business that, you know, this is, this is gonna be a generic answer and then we can use some examples. But anybody in a business that needs to move data around, particularly if they need to also work with their customers. So think of, it's like the B two, B2C model, right?

Mm-hmm. MINDBODY was that way. Form stack is the same way, but it's not just for healthcare or, or health and wellness.

It's for anyone that needs to take that data in their systems, collect it from users, and then pass it around to others. So for example, in healthcare, this would be your healthcare kind of IT administrators, professionals, support staff, and they can say, great, we've got information for our doctors, we've got information for our patients, and we need to talk about addresses and health history and medications and get that to people in billing and to the doctors and to the nurses and to the ER staff and, and all those things. And how do we get authoritative safe information to all those people across lots of different systems?

That's kind of where we come in and we help. Got it. You know, I mean, you mentioned healthcare and immediately, you know, the alarms going from my head.

Well, that's hipaa, right? That that, and that's why I could see why security becomes a really big, big consideration here. If you're gonna, I mean, this data and this data, right?

And, and some data is, is not, I want to say not more valuable, but it, it has more security considerations attached to it than other data. And, um, so that has to be, I guess, part of, part of the equation for you guys. What did you do before you bought the, what was it, Raven's?

Uh, what was the Raven Company you acquired over? Raven. Raven, Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that had to be a huge hole that got filled there. Absolutely.

And we had a few kind of individual specific things for HIPAA before that, but now with this new platform, we've got, uh, detailed, uh, machine learning models. So this is where some part of a piece of the AI comes in, right? And what we'll do with this new platform is we'll connect to these various data sources within the hospital.

So they might have Epic and Cerner, they might have their own SQL databases. We'll connect to all those. We read that data in, we classify it on the fly and build a data catalog that says, here's the 500 data fields you have.

Here are the ones that are PII, here are the ones that are hipaa, here are the ones in these different security categories. And then you can build data sets that you work with and say, don't put any HIPAA data in that one, or don't put any PI in that one. Or market is secure because we've intro inspected and discovered your data in your data sources, classified it using ai, brought it into our system, and then let someone who's making a form say, you no hipaa.

But I can do PII because I'm gonna ask people for their address and whatever else. Let me make a workflow and a form to collect that from the user. And then at the back end of that, I can write that, not just back to the admin database, but I can also say, send the updated patient medication to the doctor's notes.

And so now it'll be in the source of truth, but it'll also be somewhere else that someone else needs to use in the system again, to make that process really easy. That's where the process automation piece comes in. The whole data space is really, I, I would say since Covid, we kinda rediscovered data, right?

For a long time we were so apt focused, and this may have been your journey as well. Yep. Sean, as we were all focused on, does my app work well on Android and iPhone?

Is it, you know, is it, is it, is there a, a security, an AppSec security issue? Is, you know, all of these is there response signal, blah, blah, blah. And what we didn't focus on the data, the app is just the window into the data for the most part.

And now we've, we've kinda rediscovered data and, and how important data is, and not just data security, but using that data. But we've also discovered that, man, it could get expensive storing data, right? If we wanna, because yeah.

We wanna store everything. Um, and then in terms of data management, is that something we do in a SaaS model? Is that something where we, it locks us into a particular platform?

You know, how, how transportable is it? Yeah. Wondering at Formstack, how do you guys deal with that kind of thing?

Yeah, and you know, that's one of the, the key benefits of this new platform is we certainly at Formstack and, and mindbody before that we had those challenges. Um, with our new platform, we give customers the capability to make that all transient. So we read that data in, you know, we put it in a Redis cache or we'll, we'll cache it in memory, work with it, and then write it right back out to their systems.

So we're not storing in a permanent fashion any of their sensitive data. We're not duplicating it or having questions about, you know, who's the source of data authority, right? We're taking it from where it is, working with it, adjusting it, maybe writing it back to multiple places, but then cycling it back out of kind of our SaaS system so it stays in a good secure pipeline all the way through.

And we don't have that kind of data explosion that you sometimes get with modern software systems. Sure. A absolutely sounds good.

Let me running low with a little bit on time, Sean, let me, let me move to the customer journey, the customer experience here. How do they, how do you, uh, if it sounds good to me, I wanna interact, I wanna maybe check Formstack out. What, what's that on-ramp look like, if you will?

com. There's a lot of information there. And then depending on the size of your deal, if it's pretty small, you can do self onboarding.

You know, you can, it's the kind of the standard model. There's a few different pricing packages on the lower end. You can come in, set up your account onboard, great.

You're off to the races to go right? With this new platform and with our higher end pricing and the current platform, that's more of an enterprise sales motion. So you can call up sales, talk to them and work out the details.

You know, oh, you need forms and docs and sign and you want, you know, you want to kind of mix and match into a more complex, um, uh, price book effectively. So it just kinda depends on where you are. If you're in the, the kinda lower end of the market or the smaller size price points, self on board, it works great.

If you're something that's more complicated, more enterprisey, um, then call us and, uh, our sales team will take care of you and we'll get you set up with the right, um, set of tools for the particular job you're trying to use us for. Got it. Um, I mean, the nice thing about these kind of SaaS things is no job too small, no job too big kind of thing, or Yeah, yeah.

We can do. Is there a Sweet spot for You? You wanna, you wanna make a couple forums for your daughter's bake sale?

Awesome. We've, we've got a place for you, right? If you want to run a, you know, thousands of hotels or thousands of, um, you know, uh, small colleges or, you know, we've got customers that cross from mom and pops to big enterprise names.

So it's, it's really about, you know, do you have data you wanna move around and do you want your users to interact with it? You know, do you want your end customers to be able to fill out a form, put stuff in a document, sign a document, you know, that kind of thing. Then, then we're here for you.

Love it. Sean, we're outta time. I want to thank you for coming on here today and, and telling us a little bit about Formstack.

Uh, you know, as I said earlier, I think this is an area where we're gonna see some rapid changes. We didn't even start talking about Agentic AI and what all of that might do to this, but, um, continued success over there and, and please come back and keep us posted. Awesome.

Absolutely. Would love to talk to you again. And, uh, there'll be some interesting stuff coming out this year and, and there's definitely an agentic AI piece in there, so there'll be some fun stuff as well.

I'm sure there is. Yeah, it makes, it's a no brainer for you guys. Sean, Jack, SVP software Engineering, a Form stock here on Tech Drunk tv.

We'll take a break. We're gonna be back in a moment.