>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE
covering Conga Connect West 2018.
Brought to you by Conga.
>> Hey welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We are winding down a very busy day here
at the Conga Connect West.
We're here at Salesforce.
Benioff confirmed it.
In the keynote 171,000 registered people.
Hard to believe.
We got about 3,000 of 'em here, hosted by Conga.
Free drinks, free food, a lot of entertainment.
Come on down.
Are open for three days
and the invitation is open.
We're really happy, have two very special guests here
as we wrap up today.
We have Matt Schulz.
He's the CEO of Conga.
Matt, great to see you.
>> Great to be here.
>> And with him as Ryan Westwood,
the CEO and co founder of Simplus.
Ryan great to see you.
>> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely.
So first off, Matt great event.
You said you guys did this last year.
>> Yep.
>> Super way to get the community together,
your customers together, your people together.
Big investment.
>> It's a big investment,
but it's you know celebration of our customers
and we have the most amazing loyal customers
that I've ever seen.
So we like to get together at least once a year.
So this is not only our dream for celebration,
but this is our Conga Connect user group here as well.
>> Right.
>> So now we're excited.
>> So, It's interesting, right.
We do a ton of shows and everybody wants to get customers on
we loved to have customers on.
Their hard to get on,
either because they can't speak
or it's your strategic advantage or,
the whole bunch of reasons.
I think we've only done about six or seven eight interviews
here today and we had three customers on.
So you know nice testament to what you guys are doing.
>> Yeah.
>> And Ryan.
Tell us about Simplus.
We've been hearing about Congo all day.
Tell us about--
>> (laughs) Exactly, exactly.
>> Thank you for the opportunity.
Simplus started out as a Salesforce partner
specifically to SteelBrick.
So SteelBrick was an independent software vendor
like like Conga,
that was built on Salesforce
and Salesforce acquired SteelBrick a few years ago.
And we started out implementing SteelBrick
and then when they were acquired by Salesforce,
we took an investment from Salesforce
and really have scaled alongside of Salesforce CPQ.
But we kind of saw the emergence of CLM like we did CPQ,
where we felt like this is this is the future.
There is a big opportunity.
There's a lot of wide space.
And so when we met with Conga and the team,
we were just even more excited.
We knew that the technology in the market
had a big opportunity,
but then to have the experience of
Matt and Bob and his team combined.
We were excited to partner and go to market with Conga,
just like we did with SteelBrick.
So we've really made our brand
on being kind of ahead of the market and,
and really seeing what's happening
and implementing the technologies
that are the cutting edge of the Salesforce ecosystem.
>> Yeah, and a big ecosystem it is,
with the 170,000 people.
>> Absolutely.
Absolutely.
>> And Matt you've got this crew together.
We've heard time and time again today,
a lot of people that have worked with you in the past.
So you've got a pretty good formula,
pretty good team of folks,
that you've executed with.
What about the importance of that,
where, you know you've got trusted lieutenants,
people you've kind of done this before with
to be able to bring together coalesce relatively new team
to take this thing to the next level.
>> Yeah, we were talking a little bit
off the air that you Ryan runs a services company.
So everyone believes that the people business.
Right?
And then they meet me,
I get it in social situations,
what do you do?
I'm CEO of a software company.
They're like, oh, wow,
it'd be great to have a technology like that.
I'm like, wait a second, it's a people business.
We don't have, I tell our employees
that every time we get together,
we don't have a factory
that stamping out widgets.
Like this is a people business.
It's an interconnect with people business, actually.
So I tell people, marketing sneezes,
and, sales catches a cold,
>> Right.
>> We are all just completely joined at the hip.
So for me to have the honor of working with people,
second, third, fourth time and some of these companies,
it's pretty incredible, very blessed,
and it doesn't hurt that they're really good
at what they do.
>> Yeah, well, absolutely.
And Ryan, you've got an interesting take too.
Your, your kind of a leadership study,
or you like to interview people.
You've written lot of blog posts.
So what is it about,
kind of the leadership study that helps keep you going.
Makes you tick.
>> I think, I think as an entrepreneur,
you realize over time how much you don't know.
And it's amazing to surround yourself with other
entrepreneurs or CEOs that have experienced
things you haven't.
And so through those platforms,
Wall Street Journal, or Forbes,
the writing I've done has been amazing for education.
So I think I've interviewed 60 plus tech CEOs.
public, private, all kinds of different different sizes
of companies and I have learned so much.
It's been a it's a really fun journey.
The time I've spent with Matt and Bob
and some entrepreneurs are CEOs like,
like they are, there's just so much to learn.
So I I've enjoyed sharing my journey with other people and
writing about it,
through the Forbes platform for the last four or five years.
>> Such a great such a great lesson.
I'm reading I pulled it up.
I'm reading Sapiens right now.
I don't know if you've read that book.
Great book by Yuval Harari.
Just come out with a new
called the 21st Century.
He's a historian, greatest historian.
And he talks about one of the big changes
to go to a scientific based world was when people decided
they didn't know everything,
and embrace the fact that we didn't know everything.
And let's ask questions.
Why does the sun come up over there?
Why does the moon,
and where before it was,
kind of a deity from on high and everything is fine.
And we'll just keep it though.
So I think it's a really, smart, smart strategy
to say; I love to learn from the people.
So what I love about this job
and get to talk to smart guys like you.
Let's talk about kind about kind where Conga is going.
You've got all these connected parts,
talk to a bunch of people, you've got brought in through
acquisitions, and you've got this thread
that seems to weed through all the applications,
workflow leaves to the applications.
You got document creation,
that ties back to managing your contracts.
Interesting, how those things tie together.
And now AI.
You're going to have this kind of AI infusion.
As we talked to people all the time,
no one can go buy a pocket of AI.
what I want is AI infuse,
in all the applications that I interface
to make them work better.
So that's what's coming down.
You got to be excited about that.
>> Oh.
it's incredible.
I mean, the opportunity in front of us is amazing.
This is the third company.
I'm old, this is the third company I've been CEO of
in the electronic documents space.
So I've been in this space for 20 years now.
And to see where we've come in 20 years.
It's inspiring.
It's amazing.
If you look at just the sheer numbers
and size of market.
Congo really started in my mind, in our mind,
and our team's mind
back when we were all at DocuSign.
As you know, I was CEO of DocuSign.
Joined the company in January 2007.
And we really put the team back together.
They've built the early days of that company.
But we had a vision back then
around digital document transformation,
and it included electronic signing,
but electronic signing
was a small part of that.
And so we've been working really hard as you mentioned,
building products.
We've made some key acquisitions,
and we built out the first digital document transformation
suite in the industry.
It's all the way from collaborating,
creating documents to managing those documents
and negotiating them to full contract Lifecycle Management
with electronic signing
a state of the art orchestration layer
to build those productively for customers
with a AI platform Conga AI
supporting the entire platform.
This product groups like a dream come true for us.
It's 20 years in the making.
And we're so excited.
We've now released with the market.
Companies growing like crazy.
We've been named the fastest growing ISV
in the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
We have the highest volume downloaded app
in the entire app exchange.
And we've been rated the top
from a customer satisfaction standpoint,
the number one ISV in the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
So either a blind squirrel found a nut
or we were onto something there.
this is a hot market.
Customers like what we're doing.
We're just going to keep growing and doing more.
Yeah.
>> And we heard the announcement earlier today
about that Salesforce,
actually integrating some of your product functionality
directly into some of their offerings.
Which is a great validation.
>> Pretty excited and proud of that.
Salesforce does not, I mean, with very few exceptions,
like count them on three fingers kind of exceptions
that I know of ever resells anyone else's product.
Let alone resell it with their co branding.
And so Salesforce announced here at dream force
that they're reselling Conga's products now.
Conga core generation
is being co branded with Salesforce in Seoul
along with invoice generation.
I'm stumbling over the words because it's stunning
that it's been a few years in the making,
but we have a really strong relationship with Salesforce.
We publicly announced they're an investor in the company,
we're one of their top global ISV partners.
So it was it was in some regards,
a very natural thing for them to say,
if we're going to build our document generation
around our strongest partner.
>> Right.
Well, it's always good to hook your wagon to a rocket ship.
And as evidenced by the very large building
just outside these doors.
>> Yeah.
>> I think you picked a good one.
>> Amazing I mean we are an amazing company,
so my time with them dates back to when I was CEO DocuSign.
So we did when I was there we did the first ISV deal
of its kind with Salesforce.
This was in 2009, and then brought them in
as an equity investor in the company.
So I've always
Salesforce have been and always
near and dear to my heart and a really amazing partner.
This is my I think my 10th or 11th dream force.
And so I'm all in.
Like, well, the company's all in this is
we're all all on the Salesforce bandwagon definitely.
>> It looks like the bet's paying off.
So congratulations to you and the team.
>> Thanks, thanks.
We got a lot of work to do,
but it's going well. >> All right.
Well thanks for taking a few minute.
Ryan, Matt, and again,
congratulations on a really great event.
I think that things are turning people away the door.
It's like, two people out two people in.
(laughs)
And thanks for having us.
>> Like I said, it's nice to throw a party
and have somebody show up.
>> Absolutely.
Thank you.
>> Thanks for your time. >> All right.
He's Matt, he's Ryan
I'm Jeff.
You're watching theCUBE.
Where it's at Conga Connect West,
at Salesforce dream force in San Francisco.
Thanks for watching.
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